The Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press. The Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press, Volume 1: Beginnings and Consolidation 1640–1800 9781474499194

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES
INTRODUCTION
Chapter One BUSINESS OF THE PRESS
Chapter Two PRODUCTION AND DISTRIBUTION
Chapter Three LEGAL CONTEXTS: LICENSING, CENSORSHIP AND CENSURE
Chapter Four READERS AND READERSHIPS
Chapter Five FROM NEWS WRITERS TO JOURNALISTS: AN EMERGING PROFESSION?
Chapter Six FROM MANUSCRIPT TO PRINT: THE MULTIMEDIA NEWS SYSTEM
Chapter Seven NEWSBOOK TO NEWSPAPER: CHANGING FORMAT, LAYOUT AND ILLUSTRATION IN SEVENTEENTH- AND EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY PERIODICAL NEWS
Chapter Eight THE EVOLVING LANGUAGE OF THE PRESS
Chapter Nine NEWS, DEBATE AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE
Chapter Ten IRISH PERIODICAL NEWS
Chapter Eleven THE SCOTTISH PRESS
Chapter Twelve THE MARKET FOR THE NEWS IN SCOTLAND
Chapter Thirteen SCOTTISH PRESS: NEWS TRANSMISSION AND NETWORKS BETWEEN SCOTLAND AND AMERICA IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
Chapter Fourteen WALES AND THE NEWS
Chapter Fifteen EUROPEAN EXCHANGES, NETWORKS AND CONTEXTS
Chapter Sixteen TRANSLATION AND THE PRESS
Chapter Seventeen WOMEN AND THE EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY PRINT TRADE
Chapter Eighteen THE MEDICAL PRESS
Chapter Nineteen COMMENTING AND REFLECTING ON THE NEWS
Chapter Twenty NEWSPAPERS AND WAR
Chapter Twenty-one CRIME AND TRIAL REPORTING
Chapter Twenty-two LITERARY AND REVIEW JOURNALISM
Chapter Twenty-three PRESS AND POLITICS IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
Chapter Twenty-four RELIGION AND THE SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY PRESS
Chapter Twenty-five RUNAWAY ANNOUNCEMENTS AND NARRATIVES OF THE ENSLAVED
Chapter Twenty-six THE PRESS IN LITERATURE AND DRAMA
Chapter Twenty-seven INFORMATIONAL ABUNDANCE AND MATERIAL ABSENCE IN THE DIGITISED EARLY MODERN PRESS: THE CASE FOR CONTEXTUAL DIGITISATION
CONCLUDING COMMENTS
KEY PRESS AND PERIODICAL EVENTS TIMELINE, 1605–1800
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
Plate

Citation preview

THE EDINBURGH HISTORY OF THE BRITISH AND IRISH PRESS, VOLUME 1

The Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press Series editors: Martin Conboy and David Finkelstein Books in this series The Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press, Volume 1: Beginnings and Consolidation, 1640–1800 Nicholas Brownlees The Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press, Volume 2: Expansion and Evolution, 1800–1900 David Finkelstein The Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press, Volume 3: Competition and Disruption, 1900–2017 Martin Conboy and Adrian Bingham

T he E dinburgh H istory of the B ritish and I rish P ress , V olume 1 Beginnings and Consolidation, 1640–1800

edited by nicholas brownlees

Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses in the UK. We publish academic books and journals in our selected subject areas across the humanities and social sciences, combining cutting-­edge scholarship with high editorial and production values to produce academic works of lasting importance. For more information visit our website: edinburghuniversitypress.com © editorial matter and organisation © editorial matter and organization, Nicholas Brownlees 2023 © the chapters their several authors 2023 © ‘Case Study 10: Reading the News in Scotland: The Jacobite Rising of 1715’ by Anette Hagan, National Library of Scotland 2023 Cover image: © The Trustees of the British Museum. Cover design: Stuart Dalziel Edinburgh University Press Ltd The ­Tun – ­Holyrood Road 12(2f ) Jackson’s Entry Edinburgh EH8 8PJ Typeset in 11/13pt MillerText by Cheshire Typesetting Ltd, Cuddington, Cheshire, and printed and bound in Great Britain A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978 1 4744 9917 0 (hardback) ISBN 978 1 4744 9919 4 (webready PDF) ISBN 978 1 4744 9920 0 (epub) The right of Nicholas Brownlees to be identified as the editor of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, and the Copyright and Related Rights Regulations 2003 (SI No. 2498).

CONTENTS

List of Illustrations x Acknowledgementsxvii Contributor Biographies xix Introduction1 Nicholas Brownlees   1. Business of the Press Nicholas Brownlees and David Finkelstein

28

Case Study 1: The Times50 David Finkelstein   2. Production and Distribution Helen S. Williams

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  3. Legal Contexts: Licensing, Censorship and Censure Geoff Kemp and Jason McElligott

77

  4. Readers and Readerships Sophie H. Jones

101

Case Study 2: Readerships in Eighteenth-­century Liverpool122 Sophie H. Jones   5. From News Writers to Journalists: An Emerging Profession?129 Martin Conboy Case Study 3: Daniel Defoe Martin Conboy

144

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  6. From Manuscript to Print: The Multimedia News System Rachael Scarborough King

148

Case Study 4: The Post Boy166 Rachael Scarborough King   7. Newsbook to Newspaper: Changing Format, Layout and Illustration in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-­century Periodical News Yann Ryan Case Study 5: Form, Layout and the Digitised Newspaper: Irish News in 1649 Yann Ryan   8. The Evolving Language of the Press Nicholas Brownlees and Birte Bös Case Study 6: The Press and the Standard Accent Massimo Sturiale   9. News, Debate and the Public Sphere Pat Rogers Case Study 7: Nathaniel Mist Pat Rogers 10. Irish Periodical News Toby Barnard

170

188 195 215 220 235 239

Case Study 8: Ireland’s First Newspaper: Mercurius Hibernicus and the Court of Claims, 1663 Colum Kenny

255

Case Study 9: The Early Years of the Freeman’s Journal, 1763–1806 Felix M. Larkin

262

11. The Scottish Press Rhona Brown Case Study 10: Reading the News in Scotland: The Jacobite Rising of 1715 Anette Hagan 12. The Market for the News in Scotland Stephen W. Brown

268

280 285

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contents vii Case Study 11: Newspaper Access and Distribution beyond the Scottish Capital: The Daily Practicalities Iain Beavan 13. Scottish Press: News Transmission and Networks between Scotland and America in the Eighteenth Century Mark G. Spencer

308

313

Case Study 12: ‘Farewell to the Highlands’: Or, How Broadsides Helped Create Images of the Scottish Diaspora336 Marina Dossena 14. Wales and the News Sarah Ward Clavier

344

15. European Exchanges, Networks and Contexts Brendan Dooley

364

16. Translation and the Press Mairi McLaughlin and Nicholas Brownlees

384

Case Study 13: Gazette de Londres403 Nicholas Brownlees 17. Women and the Eighteenth-­century Print Trade Rebecca Shapiro Case Study 14: Anne Fisher and the Print Trade Rebecca Shapiro 18. The Medical Press Irma Taavitsainen Case Study 15: Knowing the Parts of Woman: How Knowledge about Reproduction and Childbirth was Communicated in the Earliest Medical Press Richard J. Whitt 19. Commenting and Reflecting on the News Edward Taylor

406 418 423

439 451

Case Study 16: John Tutchin and George Ridpath’s Observator468 Edward Taylor 20. Newspapers and War Nicole Greenspan

472

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contents Case Study 17: Mercurius Politicus and the Jamaica Invasion, 1655 Nicole Greenspan

21. Crime and Trial Reporting Elisabetta Cecconi Case Study 18: Reporting the Assassination of the Archbishop of St Andrews, 1679 Elisabetta Cecconi 22. Literary and Review Journalism Hye-Joon Yoon

489 493

507 511

Case Study 19: The Scottish Enlightenment in The Monthly Review and The Critical Review526 Hye-Joon Yoon 23. Press and Politics in the Seventeenth Century Lena Liapi Case Study 20: ‘A Hellish Conspiracy’: News Reportage of the 1696 Assassination Plot Lena Liapi 24. Religion and the Seventeenth-­century Press Katie McKeogh and Sarah Ward Clavier Case Study 21: Papistry and the News Katie McKeogh and Sarah Ward Clavier

529

538 546 561

25. Runaway Announcements and Narratives of the Enslaved John W. Cairns

564

26. The Press in Literature and Drama Michael Palmer

575

Case Study 22: Ben Jonson’s Staple of News and News from the New World Discovered in the Moon585 Michael Palmer 27. Informational Abundance and Material Absence in the Digitised Early Modern Press: The Case for Contextual Digitisation586 Paul Gooding Case Study 23: The London Gazette, or Printing the News in a Pandemic Paul Gooding

599

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contents ix Concluding Comments 602 Key Press and Periodical Events Timeline, 1605–1800 604 Bibliography623 Index678

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

Figures I.1 I.2 I.3 I.4 I.5 I.6 1.1

1.2 1.3 1.4 2.1

The Kingdomes Intelligencer, 4–11 February 1661 (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin) 6 Like many newsbooks, The Kingdomes Intelligencer made use of different fonts, including in this case gothic (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin) 7 The Character of a London-Diurnall, 1647 (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin) 12 Advertisements section in the London Gazette, 19–22 March 1687 (Courtesy of Nicholas Brownlees) 16 The Dublin Gazette, 3–6 May 1707 (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin) 18 Index of topics in bound volume of past issues of the Athenian Mercury, 1693 (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin)20 An advertisement for one of the first published accounts of the Salem witch trials, Athenian Gazette, 3 January 1692/3 (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin)35 A letter to the editor in a bound volume of the Lounger, 1785 (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin) 36 George Faulkner’s Dublin Journal, 10–14 March 1740 (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin) 46 The Oracle or Sunday Gazette (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin) 48 Wooden printing press, from T. C. Hansard, Typographia, London: Baldwin, Cradock and Joy, x

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list of illustrations xi

2.2 2.3 2.4 3.1 3.2 4.1 5.1 5.2 6.1

6.2 6.3 6.4 6.5

7.1

1825 (Reproduced by permission of the Edward Clark Collection, Edinburgh Napier University) 55 Sorting rags in an eighteenth-­century paper mill (Reproduced by permission of the Edward Clark Collection, Edinburgh Napier University) 67 Beating rags in an eighteenth-­century paper mill (Reproduced by permission of the Edward Clark Collection, Edinburgh Napier University) 68 Loft for drying paper (Reproduced by permission of the Edward Clark Collection, Edinburgh Napier University) 69 Freeman’s Journal, 26 November 1796 (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin) 83 Caricature of John Wilkes holding the cap of Liberty, 1763 (Creative Commons Licence, courtesy of Wikimedia)98 Liverpool Lyceum Building, 1828 (Creative Commons Licence, courtesy of Wikimedia) 125 Title page of the Athenian Mercury, 18 April 1693, with questions in italics and answers in roman type (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin) 136 Portrait of Daniel Defoe (Courtesy of Wellcome Collection, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0) 145 Typical eighteenth-­century newsletter using the bifolium format with white space and banner heading at the top of the first page, 26 January 1710 (Manuscript Newsletters from London, 1689–1710, Huntington Library, mssHM 30659, f. 115) 152 Newsletter showing the paragraph-­based layout of items assigned to datelines, January 1634 (anonymous newsletter, Huntington Library, mssHM 66704) 154 Map of the distribution of news items in a series of newsletters from 1690 to 1697 158 Map of the distribution of news items in a series of newsletters from 1709 to 1710 159 The Post Boy for 23 November 1710 with a manuscript newsletter added to the blank leaf left at the end of the newspaper (Pole News Collection, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, MS. 1951.021, Box 4, Folder 6, University of California, Los Angeles) 167 The title page of a ‘book-­style’ coranto with the imprint Nathaniel Butter, showing some of the typical elements, including the extensive title and sequential numbering

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7.2

7.3 7.4

7.5

7.6

7.7 7.8 7.9

7.10

list of illustrations [Call #: STC 25201a.2] (Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-­ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence) 172 Title page of A Perfect Diurnall of the Passages in Parliament, one of several with the same name, attributed to Samuel Pecke. This is typical of the ‘parliamentary diurnals’ of the Civil War period, with numbering, and a half-­page title followed by paragraphs containing daily proceedings [Call #: P1486.6 nos. 9–11] (Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-­ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence) 175 Distribution of various news types and source, all titles found in Early English Books Online, for the year 1649. Data collected by the author 176 Perfect Occurrences, displaying the unusual factotum incorporating the name of the title [Call #: 150-­373q] (Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-­ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence) 179 The London Gazette for 20–23 August 1694, which was printed in a small folio format, with two columns of text separated by a rule. This set the standard for most titles until the end of the century [Call #: L.c.2360] (Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-­ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence) 181 Graph showing the titles available per year for the eighteenth century, as held by the British Library. While very partial, this gives some indication of the rise of the newspaper and in particular the English provincial press. 183 Postscript to the Dublin Intelligence, 2 August 1707 (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin) 184 Approximate percentage of lines in London newsbooks dedicated to Irish news, January–October 1649. Data collected by the author from Early English Books Online. 190 Heatmap of the position of Irish-­related keywords, 1649. Titles are divided into 8- and 16-­page publications. Lighter shades mean more instances of the keywords in that position. Data from the Thomason Newsbooks project193 Plots showing the distribution of Irish keywords by page

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list of illustrations xiii and month, divided into 8- and 16-­page versions. Data from the Thomason Newsbooks Project 194 8.1 Mercurius Aulicus, 10–17 February 1648 (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin) 200 8.2 Poetry was regularly included in newspapers: in Faulkner’s Dublin Journal of 4–7 July 1741 a poem ‘From a young Lady to Admiral Vernon’ takes up half the middle column (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin) 204 8.3 The multi-­text characteristic of many eighteenth-­century newspapers is reflected in titles such as the Universal Journalist, 4 November 1768 (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin) 205 8.4 The Hibernian Chronicle, 2 January 1772 (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin) 212 9.1 Daniel Defoe in the pillory (1703); it was said that onlookers threw flowers towards him in support (Courtesy of Wellcome Collection, Public Domain Mark) 237 10.1 The Limerick Chronicle, 14 June 1797 (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin) 243 10.2 Votes of the House of Commons, 1 July 1707 (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin) 246 10.3 Dublin’s Public Advertiser; or, The Theatrical Chronicle, 15–18 October 1773; this specialised in theatre advertisements and news (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin)253 12.1 The Edinburgh Courant, 55, 25 June–8 October 1705, page 1 (Reproduced with permission from the National Library of Scotland, GIVB.2/20(1-)) 290 12.2 Title page of The General History of the World offered gratis by the Edinburgh Museum (Courtesy of Stephen Brown)300 12.3 The Historical Register, April 1792 (Courtesy of Stephen Brown)301 12.4 Advertisements in the Weekly Magazine (Courtesy of Bill Zachs)303 12.5 The Scots Magazine, May 1754 (Reproduced with permission from the National Library of Scotland) 304 12.6 The Glasgow Mercury with shipping advertisements, 6 December 1786 (Courtesy of Stephen Brown) 305 12.7 The Edinburgh Evening Courant, Thursday, 23 November 1752 (Reproduced with permission from the National Library of Scotland) 306

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13.1 Pennsylvania Gazette, 7 January 1746 (Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society) 316 13.2 Green and Russell’s Boston Post-Boy & Advertiser, 6 December 1762 (Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society)319 13.3 Boston Evening Post, 17 September 1764 (Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society) 322 13.4 Benjamin Franklin by Alexandre Tardieu (Creative Commons Licence, courtesy of Wikimedia) 333 13.5 Dr James Anderson (Creative Commons Licence, courtesy of Wikimedia) 334 14.1 Tlysau yr Hen Oesoedd, 1735 (© Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru/National Library of Wales) 360 15.1 News flows regarding the execution of Charles I, 1649 373 15.2 Major information transit routes c. 1690 374 16.1 The interconnectedness of European news is seen in this Express of 6 May 1707. Published in Dublin, it contains information from ‘2 English Pacquets just arriv’d which brought 2 Holland Mails, viz.’ (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin) 385 16.2 Gazette de Londres, 30 June–3 July 1690 (Courtesy of Nicholas Brownlees) 404 17.1 The Lady’s Magazine, August 1770 (Creative Commons Licence, courtesy of Wikimedia) 408 17.2 The Ladies Dictionary, 1694 (LSE Library, no restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons) 412 18.1 Edmund King, ‘Transfusing blood, an account’ (1667), a handwritten draft for Philosophical Transactions (Courtesy of Wellcome Collection, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0) 427 18.2 Engraving of the quack Dr Bossy with assistants, selling medicines in London (Courtesy of Wellcome Collection. Public Domain Mark, 1.0 Credit) 430 18.3 ‘Gin Lane’ by William Hogarth, a supporter of the Gin Act of 1751 (Courtesy of Wellcome Collection, Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)) 433 18.4 Andrew Duncan (1744–1828), editor of the first review journal collectively known as Edinburgh Medical Journal, etching by J. Kay, 1797 (Courtesy of Wellcome Collection, Public Domain Mark) 435 18.5 The Gentleman’s Magazine, January 1731 (Creative Commons Licence, courtesy of Wikimedia) 440

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list of illustrations xv 19.1 Mercurius Reformatus: Or, The New Observator, 1, Wednesday 15 May 1689 (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin)453 20.1 Title page of Common Sense by Thomas Paine, 1776 (Creative Commons Licence, courtesy of Wikimedia) 485 20.2 John Thurloe (1616–68), engraving by Jacobus Houbraken, c. 1738, after Samuel Cooper (Courtesy of Wellcome Collection, Public Domain Mark) 490 21.1 Title page of the news pamphlet Murther, Murther, 1641 (© British Library Board, Anonymous [2], 6 p. 1641, Thomason Collection, British Library, Early English Books, 1641–1700 (Wing), 255:E.172[7],Wing/M3084) 496 21.2 Front page of the newsbook The Grand Politique Post, 21–28 February 1654 (© British Library Board, Thomason Tracts. 39: E.225[14]) 498 22.1 ‘A Register of Books’, The Gentleman’s Magazine, 3 June 1733 (Courtesy of Hye-­Joon Yoon) 516 24.1 Due to the periodical’s success, in the ‘Advertisement’ the editor of the Pacquet of Advice from Rome of 23 December 1678 informs readers of a change in the day of publication (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin) 548 26.1 The Dublin Spectator, 18 March 1768 (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin) 579

Colour Plates 1 2 3 4 5 6 7

Bound volume of past issues of the Athenian Gazette, 1693 (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin) Mercurius Aulicus, 22 June 1644 (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin) Title page of John Milton’s Areopagitica, 1644 (Creative Commons Licence, courtesy of Wikimedia) Lady Mary Wortley Montagu by Charles Jervas (Creative Commons License, courtesy of Wikimedia) Masthead of the Dublin Intelligence, with last-­minute news in the right margin, 16 September 1710 (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin) Title page of Anthony Daffy’s Elixir salutis: the choice drink of health or, health-bringing drink (Wellcome Collection, Public Domain Mark) George Faulkner’s Dublin Journal, 23–26 May 1741 (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin)

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list of illustrations

8

Title page of The Ancient and Modern Scots Songs, 1769 (© National Library of Scotland, Glen.87) Title page of Eikon Basilike, 1649 (Creative Commons Licence, courtesy of Wikimedia) The Female Spectator, vol. 1, 3rd edition, 1747 (LSE Library, no restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons) ‘A Review of Books’ in Samuel Johnson’s Literary Magazine, 1, 1756 (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin) Issued at the time of the Popish Plot, the Pacquet of Advice from Rome was a successful anti-­Catholic weekly targeted at ‘Protestant Gentlemen’ (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin)

9 10 11 12

Tables 8.1 The entry for ‘merchant’ in Sheridan (1780) and Walker (1791)216 15.1 Datelines in the Paris Gazette, 2 July 1650 366 15.2 Datelines in the London Gazette, 3 May 1666 368 15.3 Datelines in Gaceta de Madrid, 5 January 1700 368 15.4 Paris Gazette story (July 1647), translated in Moderate Intelligencer (August 1647) 370 15.5 Diffusion of news about the Lisbon earthquake 377 15.6 London Morning Chronicle, January 1787 coverage 380 16.1 Omissions in the English translation in Mercurius Politicus of English news from the Gazette de France393 16.2 Dispatches from London in the Gazette de France, January 1632 399 18.1 Details of the ad hoc childbirth-­themed corpus 441 18.2 Frequency of epistemic marking in the corpus 445 18.3 Frequencies of epistemic marking in each publication. Normalised frequencies at rate per 1,000 words are provided in brackets 446 18.4 Wordlist generated from Philosophical Transactions, 1665–94, EMEMT sub-­corpus 447 18.5 Wordlist generated from Philosophical Transactions, 1700–1800, LMEMT sub-­corpus 448 18.6 Wordlist generated from the Edinburgh Medical Journal, LMEMT sub-­corpus 449 18.7 Wordlist generated from the Gentleman’s Magazine, LMEMT sub-­corpus 450

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Before writing the Acknowledgements to this first volume of the Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press 1640–2017, I turned to what had been written in the Acknowledgements of volumes 2 and 3. It seems a different world. The editors of these volumes speak of attractive university locations, libraries, archives, even bars and cafés where initial discussions and ideas regarding their respective projects were debated and developed in congenial, lively atmospheres. My volume, volume 1 in this three-­volume series, was different. It was mostly written and compiled during the Covid-­19 pandemic. However, this does not mean I have no debts to acknowledge; indeed I have many, perhaps even more than would have been the case in normal times. First of all, many sincere thanks to the general editors of the series, David Finkelstein and Martin Conboy, for entrusting me with the editorship of the first volume of this important series. Throughout the project’s inception and gestation, they have been ever supportive and helpful. A very particular thanks must necessarily go to the contributors to the volume. Unfortunately, because of the pandemic, I have not been able to meet many face to face during these difficult times, but everyone has shown extraordinary dedication. I have felt their commitment and been struck by their professionalism. They are true scholars. Particularly in the last stages of the project, I had occasion to interact with various staff members of Edinburgh University Press. Their calm efficiency and readiness to explain has been very reassuring. Many thanks to my department at the University of ­ Florence – D ­ ipartimento di Formazione, Lingue, Intercultura, Letterature e ­Psicologia – ­for both research grants and financial contributions to the CHINED series of international conferences. The series of Conferences xvii

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on Historical News Discourse (CHINED) began in Florence in 2004 and since then there have been seven further conferences in different international locations. The conferences have proved a stimulating and enjoyable setting for discussion and debate on a whole range of issues regarding the history and language of historical news. For the images in this volume I am grateful to the many authors who not only suggested suitable illustrations but also obtained copyright permission. Their work has been invaluable. One library that has been especially generous is Marsh’s Library, Dublin, a most beautiful library right next to St Patrick’s Cathedral. In August 2021 the director of the library, Dr Jason McElligott, kindly let me study its rich and in many ways unique newspaper collection. Other images were provided courtesy of the British Library, British Museum, British Newspaper Archive, Stephen Brown, Nicholas Brownlees, Folger Shakespeare Library, Edward Clark Collection, Edinburgh Napier University, Huntington Library, Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru/National Library of Wales, National Library of Scotland, Wellcome Collection, Wikicommons, Wikidata, Wikimedia, Wikipedia, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library UCLA, Hye-­Joon Yoon and Bill Zachs. Since this volume was first conceived we have had a pandemic, and now we are in the midst of a war on the periphery of Europe. Terrible. At times there seems little hope. But during the last two years two wonderful grandchildren have also been born, and it is to Giorgio and Grace that I dedicate this volume. Florence, April 2022

CONTRIBUTOR BIOGRAPHIES

Toby Barnard, FBA, MRIA (Hon.) was fellow and tutor in history at Hertford College, Oxford from 1976 to 2012, and is now an emeritus fellow. His publications include Cromwellian Ireland: English Government and Reform in Ireland, 1649–1660 (1975; pbk, 2000), A New Anatomy of Ireland: The Irish Protestants, 1641–1770 (2003; pbk, 2004), Making the Grand Figure: Lives and Possessions in Ireland, 1641–1770 (2004), Improving Ireland? Projectors, Prophets and Profiteers, 1641–1786 (2008) and Brought to Book: Print in Ireland, 1680–1784 (2017). Iain Beavan is emeritus Keeper of Rare Books, University of Aberdeen, and Honorary Research Fellow, School of Critical Studies, University of Glasgow. He has written extensively on the Scottish book trade, concentrating on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, with occasional explorations into earlier and later periods. With Warren McDougall, he wrote the chapter on Scotland for the Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, vol. 5, 1695–1830, and has written three chapters for the Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland, vols 2 and 3. He is currently preparing a chapter for volume 1 (medieval to 1707) of the same title. Recently he has also written on aspects of chapbooks and popular print in Publishing History, 81 (2019), The Journal of the Edinburgh Bib. Soc., 10 (2017), Scottish Literary Review, 11 (2019) and The Burns Chronicle, 131, 1 (2022). Birte Bös is Professor of English Linguistics at the University of Duisburg-­Essen, Germany. Her research interests include synchronic and diachronic pragmatics, discourse analysis and media linguistics. She has investigated communicative practices in historical and modern xix

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media, ranging from historical news discourse to modern social media. She is the co-­author of News as Changing Text (2015, 2nd edn, with Roberta Facchinetti, Nicholas Brownlees and Udo Fries). She has also co-­edited several books, including Changing Genre Conventions in Historical English News Discourse (2015, with Lucia Kornexl) and Norms and Conventions in the History of English (2019, with Claudia Claridge). Rhona Brown is Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-­ Century Scottish Literature and the Periodical Press at the University of Glasgow. She is author of Robert Fergusson and the Scottish Periodical Press (2012) and co-­editor of Before Blackwood’s: Scottish Journalism in the Age of Enlightenment (2015), and has published widely on the eighteenth-­ century Scottish press. She is co-­investigator on two major AHRC-­ funded textual editing projects: ‘Editing Robert Burns for the 21st Century: Poems and Correspondence’, on which she is co-­editor of Burns’s letters, and ‘The Collected Works of Allan Ramsay’, on which she is editor of Ramsay’s poems and prose. Brown is also co-­editor of the journal Scottish Literary Review. Stephen W. Brown is Professor of English and 3M Fellow at Trent University in Canada and an Affiliate with the Centre for the History of the Book at the University of Edinburgh. He co-­edited the Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland, vol. 2: Enlightenment and Expansion 1707–1800, which received an international print commendation from CILIP in 2012, edited William Smellie’s papes for the Society of Antiquaries and the National Museum of Scotland, and has authored over sixty papers, articles and chapters on the eighteenth-­ century Scottish book trade. Nicholas Brownlees is Professor of English Language at the University of Florence, Italy. He is the co-­compiler of the Florence Early English Newspapers Corpus (FEEN) and has written extensively on news discourse in the early modern era. He is the author of The Language of Periodical News in Seventeenth Century England (2011), co-­author of News as Changing Texts: Corpora, Methodologies and Analysis (2015, 2nd edn) and editor of News Discourse in Early Modern Britain (2006) and The Role of Context in the Production and Reception of Historical News Discourse (2021). He is founder and board member of the series of international conferences on Historical News Discourse (CHINED).

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John W. Cairns is Professor of Civil Law at the University of Edinburgh. His research interests include law and the Enlightenment, the history of Scots law, codification in Louisiana, and law and slavery. He has published two collections of essays in the Edinburgh Studies in Law series: Law, Lawyers, and Humanism: Selected Essays on the History of Scots Law, Volume 1 and Enlightenment, Legal Education, and Critique: Selected Essays on the History of Scots Law, Volume 2 (Edinburgh University Press, 2015). He is the co-­editor, with Paul J. du Plessis, of The Creation of the Ius Commune: From Casus to Regula (Edinburgh University Press, 2010) and Beyond Dogmatics: Law and Society in the Roman World (Edinburgh University Press, 2007). He is currently researching law and slavery in eighteenth-­century Scotland. Elisabetta Cecconi is Assistant Professor in English Language at the University of Florence. She has worked primarily in the field of early modern English and is the author of The Language of Defendants in the 17th-century English Courtroom (2012) and other articles in the field of early modern courtroom discourse. In early modern news discourse and propaganda her research focuses on the way in which ideology is constructed in historical media discourse in order to reproduce or challenge the dominant sociopolitical order. She also investigates seventeenth- and eighteenth-­century trial proceedings and how they inform crime news reports in occasional and periodical publications. Martin Conboy is Emeritus Professor of Journalism History at the University of Sheffield and co-­ director (with Professor Adrian Bingham) of the Centre for the Study of Journalism and History. An elected Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, he has published widely on the language and history of journalism. His latest publications are The Routledge Companion to British Media History (2018) with Professor John Steel and (co-­edited with Adrian Bingham) the third volume of the Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press (2020). His most recent single-­authored work is Journalism, Technology & Cultural Practice: A History (2023). His research has been funded by the British AHRC, Marsh’s Library in Dublin and the Dutch NWO. Brendan Dooley, currently Professor of Renaissance Studies at University College Cork, previously taught at Harvard, Notre Dame and Jacobs University Bremen. He works on the histories of culture and knowledge with reference to Europe and especially to Italy and the Mediterranean world. Publications include Angelica’s Book and the World of Reading in Late Renaissance Italy (Bloomsbury, 2016), xxi

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A Mattress Maker’s Daughter: The Renaissance Romance of Don Giovanni de’ Medici and Livia Vernazza (Harvard University Press, 2014), The Social History of Skepticism (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999) and, as author/editor, The Dissemination of News and the Emergence of Contemporaneity in Early Modern Culture (Ashgate, 2010). Marina Dossena is Professor of English Language at the University of Bergamo, Italy. Her research centres on Late Modern English, with special attention given to ‘language history from below’; currently involved in the compilation of a Corpus of 19th-Century Scottish Correspondence, she is co-­ editor of Token: A Journal of English Linguistics and co-edited volume 1 of InScriptum: A Journal of Language and Literary Studies. She has given plenary talks at international conferences such as ICEHL 15, ESSE 2014, FRLSU 2021 and the ‘First International Symposium on Approaches to Dialects in English Literature’ (Salamanca 2017). She has been Visiting Professor at the universities of Innsbruck, Helsinki and Complutense de Madrid, where she is now a team member in the international research project on ‘LModE Conceptualizations of Female Childhood’. David Finkelstein (BA, PhD, FEA, FRHistS, FRSA) is a cultural historian who has published over ninety books, essays and refereed journal articles in areas related to cultural history, book history, print culture and media history. several of which have won awards. His most recent work includes Movable Types: Roving Creative Printers of the Victorian World (Oxford University Press, 2018) and the Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press, vol. 2: Expansion and Evolution, 1800–1900 (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), winner of the 2021 Robert and Vineta Colby Scholarly Book Prize for its contribution to the promotion of Victorian press studies. Paul Gooding is a Senior Lecturer in Information Studies at the University of Glasgow. His research explores the impact of digital library collections on institutions and users, and how library and archival collections can be harnessed for innovative reuse in the Digital Humanities. He is particularly interested in the interaction between digitised materials, user behaviour and legal/institutional frameworks for collection development. His publications include Historic Newspapers in the Digital Age: “Search All About It!” (Routledge, 2016) and Electronic Legal Deposit: Shaping the Library Collections of the Future (Facet, 2020). He has led funded projects investigating digital

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materials in libraries and archives, including ‘Digital Library Futures’, which investigated the impact of non-­ print legal deposit, and the AHRC ‘Network to Investigate the Development of a Global Dataset of Digitised Texts’. Nicole Greenspan is an Associate Professor of History at Hampden-­ Sydney College, Virginia. She has published articles on royalist exiles as well as early modern news and print cultures, and she is the author of Selling Cromwell’s Wars: Media, Empire, and Godly Warfare 1650– 1658 (Routledge, 2016). She is currently working on two main projects: the circulation of news between Britain and the Caribbean, and the relationship between Charles II and his mistress Lucy Walter in the exiled Stuart Courts. Anette Hagan is Rare Books Curator for Early Printed Collections to 1700 at the National Library of Scotland. She is also responsible for Gaelic and Scots printed collections to 1900 and for chapbooks. Originally from Germany, her academic background is in English language, theology and book history and she has published in all three fields. Published work includes ‘The Spread of Scottish Printing’, in The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland, vol. 2, edited by Stephen Brown and Warren McDougall (Edinburgh University Press, 2011); ‘Understanding and Managing Rare Books’, SCONUL Focus 68, 2017, https://www.sconul.ac.uk/sites/default/files/documents/17_18​ .pdf; and ‘An Brief Explanation: A 1686 Pamphlet and its Nineteenth-­ century “Reprint’”, Edinburgh Bibliographical Society Journal, 2021, 89–105. She is also Reviews Editor for the Edinburgh Bibliographical Society Journal. Sophie H. Jones, an historian of the eighteenth-­ century British Atlantic, is a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Liverpool, working on the AHRC-­funded project ‘Libraries, Reading Communities and Cultural Formation in the Eighteenth-­ Century Atlantic’. She was awarded her PhD by the University of Liverpool in 2018 for her study of the development of loyalist identities in the colony of New York, and was previously a postdoctoral research associate at Keele University working on the AHRC-­funded project ‘Business News in the Atlantic World, 1620–1763’. She is particularly interested in the influence of anglophile ideas concerning sociability, the public sphere, print and material culture in shaping early American colonial and political identities.

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Geoff Kemp is a Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Auckland. He gained his PhD at King’s College, Cambridge. His publications include an account of Locke’s writings on liberty of the press in John Locke: Literary and Historical Writings (2019), and he was general editor, with Jason McElligott, of the four-­volume Censorship and the Press, 1580–1720 (2009). Colum Kenny, BCL, Barrister-­at-­Law, PhD, is Emeritus Professor of Communications at Dublin City University and a former chair of the DCU Masters in Journalism programme. A member of the National Union of Journalists, he has written widely for the national press and is a former employee of RTE, the Irish state-­owned broadcaster. He has served on the board of the Broadcasting Authority of Ireland, and is an honorary bencher of the Society of King’s Inns, Dublin. His books include King’s Inns and the Kingdom of Ireland: The Irish ‘Inn of Court’, 1541–1800 (Irish Academic Press, 1992), The Enigma of Arthur Griffith: “Father of Us All” (Merrion Press, 2020) and Midnight in London: The Anglo-Irish Treaty Crisis 1921 (Eastwood, 2021). Rachael Scarborough King is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She is the author of Writing to the World: Letters and the Origins of Modern Print Genres (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018) and editor of After Print: EighteenthCentury Manuscript Cultures (University of Virginia Press, 2020). Felix M. Larkin is a historian and retired public servant. He has written extensively on the history of the press in Ireland, and is a former chairman of the Newspaper and Periodical History Forum of Ireland. His publications include Terror and Discord: The Shemus Cartoons in the Freeman’s Journal, 1920–1924 (2009) and Living with History: Occasional Writings (2021). With Mark O’Brien, he has co-­edited two related essay collections: Periodicals and Journalism in Twentiethcentury Ireland: Writing against the Grain (2014) and Periodicals and Journalism in Twentieth-century Ireland 2: A Variety of Voices (2021). He is also a contributor to volumes 2 and 3 of The Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press. He served as academic director of the Parnell Summer School in 2013–15 and again in 2022. Lena Liapi is an Honorary Research Fellow in early modern history at Keele University. Her first monograph, Roguery in Print: Crime and Culture in Early Modern London (Boydell and Brewer, 2019), examines printed accounts of London criminals through the lenses

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of the history of crime and the history of the book. She has published works on crime, print culture, news and the public sphere. Her current research is on the history of fame in the seventeenth century and on the ways in which news media were used and understood by their readers. Jason McElligott is the director of Marsh’s Library, Dublin. He was educated at University College Dublin and St John’s College, Cambridge. He is a former J.P.R Lyell Research Fellow in the History of the Early Modern Book at Merton College, Oxford. Katie McKeogh was awarded her doctorate by the University of Oxford in 2018. She was the Sir Christopher Cox Junior Fellow and a Junior Research Fellow at New College, Oxford from 2018 to 2022. She is a historian of early modern religious and cultural history, focusing on English Catholicism and the history of the book in particular. She is presently writing a monograph, Catholic Bookmen in Early Modern England, and working on a larger project, ‘Gentleman Scholars and the “Englishing” of the Catholic Community, ca. 1560–1660’. Her broader interests include manuscript circulation and music. She has written articles for Huntington Library Quarterly, British Catholic History and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Mairi McLaughlin is Professor of French and Affiliated Member of the Departments of Linguistics and Italian Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. She specialises in French linguistics and translation studies. Her research examines language variation and change, focusing on language contact, translation and the language of the media. Her first book, Syntactic Borrowing in Contemporary French: A Linguistic Analysis of News Translation, was published by Legenda in 2011. Her second book, La presse française historique: histoire d’un genre et histoire de la langue (Garnier, 2021) presented the first systematic study of the language of the historical French press. She is currently working on digital and critical editions of the Journal de la langue françoise (1784–95) and is co-­editing with Wendy Ayres-­ Bennett The Oxford Handbook of the French Language. Michael Palmer, emeritus professor, University Paris 3, Sorbonne nouvelle, is the author, alone or with others, of thirteen books and 150 peer-­ reviewed articles. The central themes of his research are the press and media history from the seventeenth to the twenty-­first centuries, French nineteenth-­century history and international news agencies. His most recent book, International News Agencies: A History, was published by

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Palgrave Macmillan in 2019. His next book, News Then and Now, to be published by Cambridge Scholars, studies news across the millennia. Pat Rogers is Distinguished Professor Emeritus, University of South Florida, and former president of the British Society for Eighteenth-­ Century Studies, and of the Johnson Society of Lichfield. His publications include books, editions and articles on the eighteenth century, comprising the history of culture, society, politics, literature, music, architecture, law, science, medicine, antiquarianism and topography. He is editor of The Oxford Illustrated History of English Literature, and associate editor of The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Recent works include The Poet and the Publisher: The Case of Alexander Pope, Esq., of Twickenham versus Edmund Curll, Bookseller in Grub Street (2021) and Defoe’s Tour and Early Modern England: Panorama of the Nation (2022). In progress is a bibliography of Edmund Curll (with Paul Baines), and Swift in Context (with Joseph Hone). Yann Ryan completed his PhD at Queen Mary, University of London in 2019 on early modern international news flows from a London perspective, using mapping and network analysis techniques. He recently worked at the British Library as its first Curator of Newspaper Data, and on the AHRC-­funded project ‘Networking Archives’. He is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Helsinki. He has published research on British and Irish newspaper history as well as digital humanities. Rebecca Shapiro is Associate Professor in the English Department at CUNY, New York. She is interested in different ways that language affects our understanding of literature, gender and e­thnicity – ­for example, orthographically and ontologically. She has recently focused on lexicography and nationalism in eighteenth-­century England and Barbados. Her publications include Fixing Babel (2016) on lexicographical paratextual matter, articles on the history of sociolinguistics, women writers particularly Maria Edgeworth, and pedagogy, language and disability, and the politics of historical lexicography in the Caribbean. She is currently working on a handbook for Cambridge University Press for legal scholars on the history of dictionaries used in legal discourse or decisions. Mark G. Spencer, Professor of History at Brock University, is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and of the Society of Antiquaries of

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Scotland. He is the author of David Hume and Eighteenth-Century America (2005), John Beale Bordley’s ‘Necessaries’: An American Enlightenment Pamphlet in its Historical Contexts (2020) and some thirty book chapters and essays in scholarly journals such as The Scottish Historical Review, Clio, Hume Studies and The William and Mary Quarterly. Among his numerous edited and co-­edited books is The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of the American Enlightenment (2 vols, 2015), for which he was editor-­in-­chief. Massimo Sturiale is Associate Professor of English Language and Translation at the University of Catania, in Ragusa. His major research interests and publications cover issues in English historical sociolinguistics, lexicography (mainly pronouncing dictionaries), phonology and Elizabethan translations from Italian. He co-­edited, with Joan Beal and Carmela Nocera, Perspectives on Prescriptivism (Peter Lang, 2008) and, with Joan Beal, he was guest-­editor of ‘Prescriptivism and Pronouncing Dictionaries: Past and Present’, a special issue of Language and History (55/1, 2012). In 2014, with Giovanni Iamartino and Carmela Nocera, he co-­edited English Words in Time (Polimetrica International Scientific Publisher). Irma Taavitsainen is Professor Emerita of English Philology at the University of Helsinki. Her research focuses on historical pragmatics, corpus linguistics, genre and register variation and the evolution of scientific thought styles in medical writing. She has published widely in these fields, including several books and more than 130 articles in peer-­reviewed journals and books. With her team, she has compiled and published three digital corpora on medical English, the most recent being Late Modern English Medical Texts: Writing medicine in the Eighteenth Century (2019). Edward Taylor specialises in political communication and political culture in early modern Britain. He completed his BA and MPhil at Clare College, Cambridge, before studying for his PhD thesis, ‘Commenting on the News: The Serial Press and Political Culture in Britain, c. 1641–1730’, at the University of Warwick, where he was supervised by Professor Mark Knights. He subsequently worked for two years as a postdoctoral research fellow at UCL for Dr Victoria Moul’s Leverhulme-­funded project, ‘Neo-­Latin Poetry in English Manuscript Verse Miscellanies, c. 1550–1700’, publishing several articles about early modern Latin political verse.

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Sarah Ward Clavier is currently Associate Professor in Early Modern History at the University of the West of England. She is an historian of seventeenth-­century religious and political culture. Her doctoral work focused on politics, religion and historical culture in north-­east Wales, as does her monograph Royalism, Religion, and Revolution: Wales, 1640–1688 (Boydell and Brewer, 2021). Her research interests encompass life-­writing, news and media consumption in early modern Wales, and more recently episcopalian communities in the Interregnum in England and Wales. Richard J. Whitt is an Assistant Professor of Linguistics at the University of Nottingham. His areas of interest include historical pragmatics, corpus linguistics and medical writing. His most recent book is a volume of papers on historical corpus linguistics and genre studies, Diachronic Corpora, Genre and Language Change (John Benjamins, 2018), and he is currently editing a volume on the history of midwifery and childbirth, to appear with Liverpool University Press. He is also working on a book-­length project on the history of English-­language midwifery texts, 1540–1800. Helen S. Williams is the Honorary Edward Clark Fellow at Edinburgh Napier University. Her research is focused on the printing industry, its technologies and work practices. Her publications include the chapter on ‘Production’ for The Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press, vol. 2, and contributions to The Cambridge History of the Book, vol. 7 and The Edinburgh History of the Book in Scotland, vol. 4. She is the honorary secretary of the Scottish Printing Archival Trust, and in 2018 curated an exhibition to mark its 30th anniversary, and she was the programme manager for the ‘500 Years of Printing in Scotland’ celebrations in 2008. She is also the librarian to the Library of Mistakes in Edinburgh. Hye-Joon Yoon is currently Underwood Distinguished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Yonsei University, Seoul, South Korea. His research interests embrace publishing history, intellectual history and rhetorical studies of a broad range of works stretching from the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries. His publications include Metropolis and Experience: Defoe, Dickens, Joyce (2012) and The Rhetoric of Tenses in Adam Smith’s “The Wealth of Nations” (Brill, 2017). He has also published articles on Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine and The Times Literary Supplement.

INTRODUCTION Nicholas Brownlees

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his first volume of the three-­ volume series Edinburgh History of the British and Irish Press 1640–2017 covers the history of the press of these nations from 1640 to 1800. We are going back in time to the very beginnings of periodical print news, yet what frequently struck me in editing the volume was just how much of this past resonates with the present. Below are some contemporaries, both modern-­day and early modern, commenting on the media in their time: we probably both agree that we’re living in an age, to a large extent, of information chaos, which is probably getting worse. (Rusbridger 2020) It has been made a Question long agoe, whether more mischief then advantage were not occasion’d to the Christian world by the invention of Typography. (L’Estrange, A Rope for Pol, 1660, 1) During the ­war . . . ­opinions were fiercely divided. Both sides were certain they were right. So, as journalists, we had to be very clear about our function. It’s to give people the plain, unvarnished facts. (Simpson 2014) Nor will [the writer] give any Comments or Conjectures of his own, but will relate only Matter of Fact; supposing other People to have Sense enough to make Reflections for themselves. (editorial message in inaugural issue of Daily Courant, 11 March 1702) The parallels are clear and go to the heart of the media past and present. Print and the early periodical press were new, wonderful but disruptive, as is the explosion of social media and online news today. Both 1

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then and now society was in the throes of an information revolution (Sommerville 1996; Rusbridger 2018). For some people such seismic changes are extraordinarily empowering, for others, the new media landcape is threatening, dangerous and to be reined ­back – i­ f possible. In such times, where consensus seems a relic of the past and the public is suspicious of what they read and hear, the news writer will often fall back on the one commodity that would appear free of manipulation and propaganda. For the BBC news editor John Simpson, it is ‘plain, unvarnished facts’, while for the editor of the first English daily of 1702 it was ‘Matter of Fact’. As C. P. Scott, the Guardian’s renowned editor, wrote: ‘Comment is free, but facts are sacred’ (Manchester Guardian, 5 May 1921). Of course, there is a limit to how far we can see parallels between the twenty-­first century and the first decades of the periodical press, but two important features characterise them both: first, then as now, the news writer had a story to tell to an interested but often sceptical audience; secondly, then as now, the world of news was breaking established models of news dissemination and the kinds of social interaction deriving from it. It is this that makes me think of L. P. Hartley’s oft-­quoted aphorism and its pertinence to the early British and Irish press. To what extent was the early modern press ‘a foreign country’ (Hartley [1953] 1962: 17) and inherently different from now? It will be up to the reader to decide, but contributions to this volume would suggest underlying affinities: similarities of linguistic expression, content, professional practice and basic financial objectives, needs and resources have existed throughout the history of the press. This latter financial dimension is important, for although the early modern press never brought the same kind of wealth and fame to newspaper proprietors that can be acquired nowadays, it often informed if not dictated content and business organisation. As the simply-­run news publications of the 1640s and Interregnum gradually transformed into the more complex, organisational set-­ups of the eighteenth century, so too the question of costs and revenue needed to be factored in ever more carefully regarding such matters as the selection of news sources and content (including the presence if not occasional omnipresence of advertising), layout and size of page, the employment of apprentices and journeymen in the printing house, not to mention the hawkers, running footmen and post coaches involved in the newspapers’ distribution, as well as the payment of news writers, translators and the emerging profession of journalists and foreign correspondents in the later eighteenth century (Harris 1978; Barker 2000: 95–121; Gardner 2016).

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introduction 3 The 1640s have been selected as the volume’s starting point because that was the decade when news publications containing both foreign and domestic news started coming out on a more or less regular basis (Raymond 1996). Prior to this there had been serialised print news, but due to censorship restrictions these publications, which were generally referred to as corantos, had just provided foreign news (Boys 2011). While different in news content and regularity of publication from the 1640s periodical news, corantos will nevertheless occasionally be referred to, and especially in Chapters 7 and 8 which examine the layout and language of early print news. Therefore, while believing that the 1640s are a good starting point for our history, we do not wish to suggest that the periodical press emerged from nowhere. A demand and market for print news had existed before (Raymond 1996: 1–13; 2003: 98–151). What, however, was so innovative about the 1640s was that a new, motley but committed group of news writers and publishers exploited the erosion of royal authority and censorship, amid the tensions leading up to the Civil War, to publish weekly news pamphlets containing not just foreign news but also information about the country where the readers actually lived. The first English periodical to include domestic news was The Heads of Severall Proceedings in this Present Parliament, from the 22 of November to the 29. 1641 (22–29 November 1641) (see Raymond 1996: 80–126). Published in London, it is not a title that rolls lightly off the tongue, but the fact that it reported parliamentary business was sufficient to differentiate it from what had been published before. Its publisher, John Thomas, was bringing out a different kind of news publication as a sideline, hoping to make a bit of money from it. Through the long descriptive title he was indicating the contents of a short news pamphlet which might or might not be continued in the following weeks depending on its success. That was the embryonic news world of 1641–2. As it happened, Thomas’s experiment caught public attention, other newsmen and publishers joined the fray and the periodical press had started. This was of great historical importance, but it would be wrong to say that its origins lay in some sort of big bang. That was not the case. The start of the periodical press did not mean the end of c­ ensorship – ­far from it. Cromwell reimposed it at the end of the Civil Wars in 1649 (Frank 1961: 197–8) but by then the genie had been let out of the bottle. Periodical news would continue to be controlled in one shape or form throughout our period but never again would published news solely regard foreign events. That belonged to the past.

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Although there is something to be said for Gross’s view that ‘[n]othing of significance ends at the end of a century; nothing of significance begins at its beginning’ (Gross et al. 2002: 90), in our particular case the ending of this first volume in 1800 is apt. The last decade of the eighteenth century witnessed important new directions in the world of the press that would come to shape the news in the following century. Beginning with the Sunday press, it was in 1791 that Britain’s oldest extant British Sunday title, the Observer, was founded. This move towards Sunday newspapers was to become ever more prominent in the next century as some of the papers’ owners modelled them as successful ‘entertainment papers’ (Conboy 2010: 69). The 1790s also saw an acute politicisation of parts of the press as it reacted to what was happening in revolutionary France. The initial, generally positive reception to cross-­Channel news transformed into a much more fractured, divisive response as the situation in Paris turned increasingly turbulent. The physical violence transforming French society was mirrored rhetorically in the British and Irish press as ever more entrenched conservative and radical titles waged ideological warfare. The founding and temporary success of the radical press in the 1790s was a forerunner of the second wave of radical, unstamped periodicals in the 1830s (Conboy 2010: 70). However, it was not only in politics that the 1790s press set the scene for impassioned debate. In both the metropolitan and provincial press, the early 1790s witnessed the publication of leaders, letters, petitions and other materials both for and against the slave trade (Barker 2000: 171–5). The anti-­slavery press played an important part in the campaign leading to the abolition of the British slave trade in 1806–7. In saying that our history moves from the beginnings of the periodical press towards a ‘consolidation’, as indicated in the volume subtitle, we are intentionally eschewing a Whig interpretation of the history of newspapers and periodicals. Ours is not an uplifting celebration of the inexorable rise of an ever more objective, democratic press but rather a factually based analysis of what was occurring in these first decades of its history. The consolidation lies above all in the simple but important recognition that by the end of the eighteenth century the periodical press, which had initially been based in London, was now spread out throughout the lands, that what had been a press of the few was now of the many, that what had been a weekly eight-­page quarto pamphlet containing hard news was now both weekly and daily, usually in four dense full-­folio pages, containing some if not all of the following: hard news from the five continents, editorials, letters to the editor, trial reports, book reviews, poetry with sometimes a ‘poets corner’, and

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introduction 5 tens of advertisements of every hue and kind (Morison [1932] 2009: 173–202; Barker 2003: 105–6; Gardner 2016: 47–67). The eighteenth century showed that not only were newspapers and periodicals here to stay but that within their jam-­packed pages a whole myriad of readers from the furthest reaches of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland, and beyond, including the newly independent United States of America as well as distant India, and those islands in the Caribbean that now fell within the British Empire, were able to read in the native English tongue of news and events throughout the globe. This is not to say that the late eighteenth-­century press was necessarily ‘democratic in interests or intentions’, but it was a unique ‘populariser, of ideas, news and goods’ (Black 1992: 23). In London the sixteen dailies, seven tri-­weekly and two bi-­weekly papers (Black 1992: 13) included The Times (1788), while beyond the metropolis there were more than seventy English provincial newspapers in regional centres such as Exeter, Bristol, Norwich, Chester, Manchester, Sheffield and Newcastle; beyond these urban conglomerates there were other successful titles such as the Sherborne Gazette, Salisbury Journal and Stamford Mercury (Cranfield 1962: 1–27; Black 1992: 13–23; Matthews 2017: 31–58). Wales would shortly be getting its first English-­language newspaper, the Cambrian, in 1804, while the Scottish press included not just well-­established titles in Edinburgh but also newspapers in Glasgow, Aberdeen, Dundee and Dumfries (Brown 2012). Moving across the Irish Sea, the Irish press had expanded from its base in Dublin to set up newspapers in Belfast, Cork, Limerick, Waterford and Kilkenny (Munter 1967; Barnard 2017: 63–72). It is this story that the volume sets out to tell in the following chapters and case studies. The five core chapters regard the business of the press, production and distribution, legal constraints and opportunities, readers and readerships, and the emerging identities and communities of news writers and journalists. The volume then continues with studies on a full range of concerns befitting such an inherently interdisciplinary study as the history of the British and Irish press. Some of these chapters will focus on particular national realities such as those in Scotland, Ireland and Wales while other chapters will have a cross-­national dimension. The chapters are interspersed with case studies providing further focus on particular people, titles and other press-­related phenomena. The contributions examine features relating to the production, transmission and reception of not just periodical news publications but also the more specialised press such as periodical essays, literary and

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review journalism, and medical journals. The term ‘periodical news publications’ certainly includes eighteenth-­ century newspapers but also those news publications which in the seventeenth century went by a variety of names (Brownlees 2015; Ryan, this volume). Up until 1640 there was general contemporary consensus regarding the term ‘coranto’ (or orthographic variations of the word) for the serialised quarto pamphlets containing foreign news, but contemporaries and news historians have adopted various terms for the periodical news press from 1641 up until the end of the century. Nowadays, more or less settled terms for the quarto news pamphlets from 1641 up until the London Gazette (1665) are ‘newsbook’ and to a lesser extent ‘news-­ sheet’, but we must accept that this principally serves the practical purpose of classifying publications which for contemporaries were also referred to as ‘diurnal’, ‘mercury’, ‘book’, ‘gazette’, ‘pamphlet’, ‘paper’, ‘sheet’ and ‘Intelligencer’ (Brownlees 2015) (see Figure I.1). Likewise, for the thirty years separating the founding of the London Gazette from the post-­Licensing Act publications of 1695 there is no settled descriptor. Birte Bös and I have referred to the London Gazette

Figure I.1  The Kingdomes Intelligencer, 4–11 February 1661 (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin)

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introduction 7

Figure I.2  Like many newsbooks, The Kingdomes Intelligencer made use of different fonts, including in this case gothic (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin)

as the first English newspaper since it was ‘a printed, serialised publication distinct in format from a pamphlet or book, appearing at least once a week and containing information regarding recent domestic and foreign events’ (Brownlees and Bös forthcoming), but for other news historians the term ‘newspaper’ can be equally applicable to earlier publications (see Black 2019: 17; Kyle and Peacey 2008). Similarly wide-­ranging are the various meanings given to the very term ‘news’. For Will Slauter, late seventeenth-­century news is ‘defined as timely reports on public affairs and commerce’ (2015: 19), while in Hannah Barker’s study of newspapers (1695–1855): ‘news’ will be taken to mean information on recent or current events of interest to the public and forming the subject of public debate. Such a definition is also not u ­ ncontentious . . . ­when for some, all types of gossip, anecdote and fashionable, moral or religious discussion were deemed worthy of being termed ‘news’. (Barker 2000: 2)

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What emerges from the definitions is the fuzziness of the term. On the one hand, ‘news’ regards the content of those reports on current ­events – ­the so-­called ‘hard news’ – but on the other there is the recognition that the term ‘news’ could also have a much wider meaning to include ‘gossip, anecdote and fashionable, moral or religious discussion’. We therefore have a certain semantic ambiguity regarding both ‘news’ and in what exactly this news was c­ ontained – ­be it ‘newsbook’, ‘news-­sheet’, ‘newspaper’, ‘magazine’ or whatever. This needs to be accepted, indeed embraced, for it bears witness to the true organic development of a cultural ­phenomenon – ­the ­press – ­which in its multifarious forms reflected the ever greater complexity of a rapidly expanding and variegated readership. Bearing this in mind, this present volume examines different forms of news and opinion in different news formats ranging from the hard news reports of the seventeenth century to the much wider understanding of the term ‘news’ in, for example, the generalist newspapers, specialist journals and periodical essays and magazines of the eighteenth century catering particularly for a female audience. Moving from the news f­ormat – a­ nd the accompanying business, technological, professional, legal and further contextual matters surrounding and making up the production of the ­text – ­to news networks and the transmission of news, this study includes chapters on ‘European Exchanges, Networks and Contexts’, ‘News Transmission and Networks between Scotland and America in the Eighteenth Century’ and ‘Translation and the Press’. The notion of early modern news as a transnational phenomenon has received particular interest in the last few years with Raymond and Moxham’s News Networks in Early Modern Europe (2016), a standout contribution in the area. The research into transnational networks and transmission has further stimulated recent enquiry into how news was translated from one language to another (Brownlees 2018; McLaughlin 2022). As McLaughlin and Brownlees point out in Chapter 16, the translation could be both into and out of English, since throughout the period, newspapers in not only Britain and Ireland but also continental Europe relied heavily on translation for their reporting of international news. The chapter on translation coupled with another on ‘The Language of the Press’ and two further case studies reflect the focus we have given to not just the content and context of the press but also the language used to express it. In our opinion the collaboration of news historians with historical news linguists can be productive. As Tony McEnery, a professional linguist, and Helen Baker, a professional

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introduction 9 historian, write in their co-­authored volume on the representation of prostitution in seventeenth-­century culture and print, including print news: The linguist brings expertise in the manipulation and understanding of large textual databases, with experience of the insights that can be brought about by the appropriate use of the tools of the corpus linguist. The historian brings their knowledge of the period and topic in question, with a well-­developed sense of the hypotheses of interest to that subject community and a body of work that can help to frame and explain what the corpus investigation finds. (McEnery and Baker 2016: 1) Turning our attention to the reception of the press, four questions that come immediately to mind are: who read the news and why, where did they read it, and what impact if any did the press have in early modern society? Different contributions to the volume engage with these topics, including Sophie H. Jones’s core chapter on ‘Readers and Readerships’, Rebecca Shapiro’s ‘Women and the Eighteenth-­century Print Trade’ and Pat Rogers’s ‘News, Debate and the Public Sphere’. What emerges from these and other chapters is the realisation that while recent research has provided an ever more nuanced understanding of what literacy meant in practice, and who was reading the press and where (R. Houston 2013; Ferguson and Suzuki 2015; Towsey 2011; Ellis 2018), there are still significant gaps in our understanding of why exactly people were reading and whether the reading could then lead to some kind of social change. In our period the advent of newsbooks in the early 1640s is considered groundbreaking because their publication not only reflected sociopolitical change but also contributed to it (Raymond 1996: 20–79; Kemp and McElligott, this volume), but leaving aside these revolutionary years it is ‘notoriously tricky to measure’ (Dooley, this volume) the full extent of the press’s impact on society. Likewise problematic is the ascertainment of readers’ intentions. Why, for example, did coffee houses attract so much custom? Did the reading of newspapers merely serve an informative ­function – ­letting readers find out about the latest political events which would then be discussed and civilly debated (see Habermas [1962] 1989) – or could the reader’s intention also be socially motivated? With the news at their fingertips readers could enter and participate in the various conversations and social spaces making up the coffee house experience, which otherwise for the uninformed would have left them on the sidelines. This more social side to coffee houses is reflected in Samuel Johnson’s definition

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of them as ‘a house of entertainment’ in his Dictionary of the English Language (1755). This introduction will now continue with an examination of five key years and periods from 1640–1800. They are respectively 1643, 1671, 1701–10, 1730 and 1789–93. These years are important in themselves and for what they tell us more generally about the development of the press from 1640 to 1800.

1643 This year’s importance has its roots in the launch of the weekly newsbook Mercurius Aulicus in the second week of January. Mercurius Aulicus (henceforth Aulicus) introduced a rhetoric that was to prove very different from what had been found before in the serialised press. With this new style of writing Aulicus set off the pamphlet wars of the 1640s and initiated a combative style of news discourse whose tone and features were to re-­emerge in the press campaigns of the second half of the eighteenth century. Prior to Aulicus, the newsbooks that had followed The Heads of Severall Proceedings in this Present Parliament, from the 22 of November to the 29. 1641 had not fundamentally differed from the generally dry, impersonal style of this first newsbook. Unlike the foreign news corantos of the past, the 1642 newsbooks included both domestic and foreign news, but in their writing up of the news they still adopted the same factually detached rhetoric as the corantos (Frank 1961: 24–31; Raymond 1996: 20–6). Samuel Pecke’s A Perfect Diurnall of the Passages in Parliament was one such newsbook. Typical in consisting of eight quarto pages, with the first page devoted to the title, it usually distanced itself from the information it was reporting. This mode of news presentation continued even after the king’s raising of the standard in August 1642 and the first significant Civil War battle at Edgehill in October. Some newsbooks became more partisan in their outlook, which in practice meant more parliamentarian since they were published in London, a parliamentary stronghold, but nevertheless they were not yet overtly sectarian. It was Aulicus that first set about engaging directly in propaganda and polemic. Published in Oxford, where Charles I’s court had taken refuge after leaving London, the weekly royalist periodical was elegantly produced, cleverly written and extremely effective (Thomas 1969: 28–98). Soon settling on a more or less fixed structure, the principal editor of the newsbook, John Berkenhead, would first report and

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introduction 11 comment on each day’s news during the previous week, and then conclude the pamphlet with an attack on the parliamentary press (Frank 1961: 34). Here below in his first skirmish with Mercurius Britanicus (henceforth Britanicus), Aulicus’s foremost adversary, he also rebuts the news in Mercurius Civicus, another leading pro-­Parliament newsbook which had begun publication in May 1643. All other Newes (I mean Lyes) you must expect from a fine new thing, borne this weeke, called Mercurius Britannicus, for Mercuries (like Committees) will beget one another. But sure he is no true Brittaine, for the first thing he said, is, That most of the Welchmen for piety and godlinesse are as ignorant as Heathens (the man begins handsomely. (2. He says, that the Irish rebels doe daily land in Wales, and are there made welcome; (They’le doe as much for you, if you’le goe thither.) . . . Thus we hope Britannicus will prove a towardly Child, able ere long to challenge his Brother Civicus, who this weeke puts in for a share and tells us . . . (Mercurius Aulicus, 27 August–2 September 1643)

The pungent irony, satire and raillery of Aulicus were only fully challenged by the London press when Britanicus started publication in the last week of August 1643. At first edited by Thomas Audley, and then increasingly by probably the greatest news writer and editor of the age, Marchamont Nedham, Britanicus brilliantly took on Aulicus, taking ever greater delight in the king’s growing political and military difficulties at the end of the year (Raymond 1996: 26–32, 152–5; Raymond 2004; Peacey 2004b: 189–91). This war of words did not ultimately change the final outcome of the English Civil War, for that was decided on the battlefield, but for the first time in English history the ­protagonists – ­both royalists and ­parliamentarians – ­recognised and exploited the potentialities of a new force: regular print news and propaganda. This new role of the press gave a visibility to its writers and editors which, with the exception of Thomas Gainsford, the editor of corantos between 1622 and 1624, had not previously existed. Editors such as Berkenhead and Nedham began to be noticed and commented upon, though the descriptions that have been handed down are not generally flattering. John Berkenhead was described by John Aubrey in Brief Lives as ‘exceedingly bold, confident, not very grateful to his benefactors; would lye damnably. He was of midling stature, great goggle eies, not of a sweet aspect’ (1898, I: 105) while Marchamont Nedham was not just ‘hollow-­hearted, empty scull’d, barren of invention, a lover of baseness’ (Cheynell[?] 1645: 1) but such an habitué of taverns and ale

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houses that on his temporary absence from London ‘there is a great lamentation made for the losse of him at many Tavernes in the City, especially at the Mere-­maid in Cheapeside, for they have lost a sweet customer of ­him . . . ­Masters of many Tavernes mourne for the losse of him (Cheynell[?] 1645: 3). Biased or not, and in Nedham’s case most likely so, the tenor of these descriptions nevertheless reflects much of the scepticism and occasional downright hostility that the world of news had been subjected to since the emergence of corantos in 1620 (Conboy 2010: 20–1; Atherton 1999b). Broadly repeating the same kind of accusations found in Ben Jonson’s masques and plays of the 1620s, and in unflattering portrayals of the 1640s such as The Character of a London-Diurnall (Figure I.3), the contemporaries of Berkenhead and Nedham identify two basic flaws in the news writers’ character and lifestyle: lying and drinking. Both of which meant that they and their news were untrustworthy. In the highly charged propaganda battles of the 1640s allegations of mendacity were common and frequently rightly placed. As common in the early years of periodical news were accusations of drink-­fuelled

Figure I.3  The Character of a London-Diurnall, 1647 (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin)

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introduction 13 journalism, where the press’s association with alcohol and drunkenness meant that either the source providing the news was to be considered unreliable or the writer ­himself – ­likewise in his ­cups – ­was not to be believed. This former scenario is humorously exemplified in John Crouch’s satirical newsbook Mercurius Democritus. In the news item the satirist reports a naval battle where the eyewitness upon whom the report is based is ‘dead drunk all the time’: many French Pyrats that lay sculking about the Western coast were run on ground and so split, and Vantrump, Everson, De Wit and Ruttyer ships and all (reported by a Dutch Boswan that lay fast asleep under-­decks dead drunk all the time of this wonderfull Battell) are either sunk, cast away or ship-­wrecked. (Mercurius Democritus, 3–10 November 1652) This largely negative image of the news world never lay far below the surface during the rest of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and indeed some would say it lasts up to the present day. The first recorded association of Grub Street with the world of pamphleteering is in Mercurius Fidelicus (1648), which refers to the ‘Grub-­street Pamphleteer’ (Oxford English Dictionary; see also Peacey 2013: 246– 52). Grub Street, and the various literary and news hacks associated with its hand-­to-­mouth existence, remained a constant backdrop to news reporting in our period, and it is not surprising that one of the most satirical and insightful periodicals to examine the world of news in the early eighteenth century was titled the Grub-Street Journal (1730–38). This journal, and what it said about news, will be examined after the following two studies on 1671 and 1700–10.

1671 The autumn of 1671 proved a particularly unfortunate season for the Royal Family’s dogs. Lost, or perhaps even stolen, the fate of various dogs belonging to the Royal household dominated the ‘Advertisements’ sections of the London Gazette of the time. A close reader of the newspaper of public record would have had good reason to believe that whatever other problems the king and queen might be facing they could well be inferior to their canine concerns. The problems begin in the issue of 18–21 September 1671: Lost on the 14 of August 71, a little Spaniel Bitch of Her Majesties, well hung, with some large Liver Spots and all Motled about the Brest, with long hair about her feet; if any one can bring tydings of

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this Bitch to Major Halsey, being one of Her Majesties Querries, at his Lodgings in St. James Market place, they shall be very well rewarded for their pains. On 16 November the situation appears even more dramatic. This time it is not only the ‘Royal Highness’ who has lost another spaniel (‘who will answer to the name Towser’) on 15 November but in another notice we read of a ‘Dogg of his Majesties; full of blew spots’ that was ‘Lost four or five days since’. With both notices reprinted in the issue of 16–20 November one can only conclude that at least up until then the dogs were still at large despite the queen’s promised reward and the clear instructions in the king’s advertisement that the dog should be taken to ‘the Porters at Whitehal’. Apart from what they tell us about the Royal Family’s love of dogs, these advertisements are interesting for several other reasons. First, the mere fact that the notices have been placed in the ‘Advertisements’ section is significant. At that time, and throughout the eighteenth century, the term ‘advertisements’ included not only what we nowadays associate with the w ­ ord – t­he promotion of goods and s­ ervices – ­but also other announcements touching upon the private sphere and personal matters. These included notices regarding runaways (often women and servants), other missing persons announcements, stolen property and various other matters relating to Lost and Founds. This broader meaning given to ‘advertisements’ needs consideration when we assess why, for much of the rest of the seventeenth century and early part of the eighteenth century, the advertisements section of a newspaper was often so popular with readers (Pettegree 2014: 306–7). Pettegree rightly concludes that the announcements let readers into the ‘everyday lives of the local public’ (2014: 306) though the ‘public’ not only included the middling and upper sorts making up most of the readers of the London Gazette but also in the particular case above the highest levels of English society. In fact, it can be argued that the interest in the advertisements section of a newspaper goes back to the announcements about the Royal Family’s dogs in 1671. This flurry of advertisements, the first of its kind in relation to the Royal Family, provided an exciting glimpse of the more private side of royal life. It is the first indication of what was to transform this part of the London Gazette, and later other newspapers too, into one of the most interesting rubrics of any newspaper. Advertisements had already been included in some Interregnum newsbooks (Nevitt 2017) but it was only with the London Gazette in the 1670s that they became a fixed feature of a newspaper. The advertisements no

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introduction 15 doubt brought in money right from the ­beginning – ­although it is hard to imagine the king and queen ­paying – ­but apart from this important source of revenue they also served the proprietor well because of their reader appeal. The ads not only let you into the lives of what Addison referred to as the ‘little World’ (Tatler, 14 September 1710) but also into much higher social echelons such as the Royal Family. Over the following decades, and in particular from the turn of the new century, advertisements came to include ever more promotional texts, but there remained throughout this other ‘local’ feature which aroused readers’ interest and curiosity, and more recently academic interest. For example, regarding the latter, in Chapter 25 of the present volume John Cairns investigates ‘Runaway Announcements’ in the British press (see also Włodarczyk 2021). The runaways ranged from sailors and soldiers to apprentices and servants under indenture, and to others who though not described as slaves were clearly in some way enslaved. The language in these announcements is pithy, matter of fact and often heart-­rending: John Rausom, aged about twelve years, or thereabouts, went away on the 24th of October last, from aboard the New Advice, Robert Elfield Master, lying at Shadwel-Dock, by break of Day, the said Boy had a Grey Coat, a black Plush Cap, with a Horse-­Lock, and small Chain about his Leg. Whosoever can bring the said Boy unto Mr. William Dodson, Cheesmonger upon St. Mary-Hill, Billingsgate, or to Eubulus Webb, Undertaker, at the Sign of the Rein Deer at Wapping Dock, shall have 40 s. reward. (London Gazette, 23–6 January 1681) Runaway from Crambourne Lodge near Windsor, the Second Instant at night, a tall Blackamore, of a more than ordinary stature, in a Green Doublet and Breeches, with a large Chairmans Coat of the same colour, Laced with Sir Robert Holmes his Livery. Whoever will bring Notice of him to Mr. Charles Wheeler, Goldsmith, at the Golden Tun near Ivy-Bridge in the Strand, shall be well rewarded. (London Gazette, 2–5 January 1681) In the late 1600s and first decades of the eighteenth century commercial advertisements mostly consisted of recently published books and to a lesser extent medical cures (Walker 1973: 117–19; Brownlees 2021: 2): the Enlightenment was as much absorbed by the body as by the soul. The book ads were frequently placed by booksellers who, as a secondary income, had acquired an interest in the newspaper in question. This ‘interdependence of books and periodicals’ (Ferdinand

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Figure I.4  Advertisements section in the London Gazette, 19–22 March 1687 (Courtesy of Nicholas Brownlees)

1999: 165) proved beneficial to bookseller cum newspaper proprietor as well as periodical reader. The kinds of books advertised provide a good reflection of the topics that interested readers at any particular time. In a study of books advertised in the Post Boy (1721), the following sub-­genres are identified: religion, history, the English language, legal self-­help manuals, the South Sea Bubble, ‘Entertainment of the Ladies’, poetry, court proceedings and venereal disease as well as other medical matters (Brownlees 2021). Ads could be repeated from one issue to the next, and in the case of medical books frequently were. However, it was just this repetition of medical advertisements on such matters as venereal disease that caused a reader of Mist’s Daily Journal in 1726 to complain to the editor about the ‘tedious repetition of nauseous (though perhaps to you profitable) advertisements’ (Black 1987: 59).

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introduction 17

1700–10 The first decade of the eighteenth century is unquestionably one of the most important in the history of the press. Landmark events included the founding of the first English provincial newspapers in Norwich (1701) and Bristol (1702?), the publication in London of both the first daily, the Daily Courant, in 1702, and the first evening newspaper, the Evening Post in 1706, as well as the launch of some of the most significant periodicals of the eighteenth century, including the Review, Examiner, Tatler and Female Tatler. Outside England the second half of the decade also saw a flurry of press activity in Edinburgh following the launch of the first fully pledged Scottish newspaper, the Edinburgh Gazette, in 1699. When this newspaper lost its monopoly position, it was joined by the Edinburgh Courant (1705) and Edinburgh Flying Post (1707), among others. In early eighteenth-­century Ireland the press was still confined to Dublin, but with the number of printers increasing from three in 1690 to fourteen in 1710, and the country on the cusp of a phenomenal demographic growth (Munter 1967: 18), conditions were ripe for an important expansion. This duly occurred in Queen Anne’s reign with the appearance of thirty-­seven newspaper titles (Barnard 2017: 64). Admittedly, only six were to last long but they included important ones such as the new official government organ, the Dublin Gazette (1705) (Figure I.5). With so many provincial and regional newspapers now fully searchable in online archives such as the British Newspaper Archive (www​ .britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk) it is to be hoped that the increased access to the non-­metropolitan press will attract greater academic investigation. However, as Paul Gooding argues in Chapter 27, there are limits to what scanned and digitised texts can tell us about the meaningful material features of a newspaper. To what extent is it possible to explore the ‘ontological rift’ between the diverse material forms of the newspaper as object, and the digitised newspaper archive as entity? In the podcast of his Lyell Lecture at the University of Oxford, Michael Suarez refers to this question and the need for newspaper historians to create protocols that can ‘attend to the object in all its historical pluraformity in the ways that its materialities contribute to the making of culturally instantiated meaning’ (2015). The extraordinary dynamism and expansion of the British and Irish press in the first years of the eighteenth century had various causes. The first was the new legislative framework following the

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Figure I.5  The Dublin Gazette, 3–6 May 1707 (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin)

lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695. The demise of the Act, and hence of the licensing system, has been rightly described as ‘a watershed in the history of the English press’ (Harris 1978: 83). In this freer, more competitive market, in which the London Gazette no longer had a quasi-­monopolistic position, there were no legal restraints preventing potential publishers from setting up and running a newspaper should they think money was to be made. And money was to be made. First, profits could be made through newspaper sales. Even if circulations remained in the low thousands, tri-­weeklies such as Post Man and Post Boy could turn in a profit. Expenses were limited and certainly did not include the payment of signed-­up reporters: they did not as yet exist. The ‘scissors and paste’ technique (Black 2019: 30), whereby newspapers lifted news and texts from other newspapers, ensured that acquiring and writing up news was inexpensive. The lifting of texts also included previously translated foreign news reports. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries British and Irish

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introduction 19 news publications frequently turned to translation in their coverage of international events. However, apart from sales revenue, it was mostly through advertising that substantial profits were to be found. The London press, in particular, cashed in on the nascent consumer society developing in the capital. Although the press outside London carried fewer advertisements, many of them were repeated week after week, thereby bringing in a simple and tidy profit for these newspapers too. The Review (1704–13), Tatler (1709–11) and Spectator (1711–12) likewise included much lucrative advertising, but apart from that they had a parallel development to mainstream newspapers (Conboy 2010: 37). Where the former differed was in their urbane and often entertaining discussion of social, moral and ethical issues of the day (McBain 2016). For example, aside from the main political section of his Review, Daniel Defoe introduced in September 1704 the monthly supplement Advice from the Scandal Club. The ‘Club’ responded to readers’ queries regarding a whole range of social situations including gambling, unfaithful husbands, unrequited love, mistress–servant relations and who had the right to keep a piece of gold left behind in a coffee house (November 1704). As for many readers this part of the publication was of greater interest than the main political section, in 1705 Defoe decided to launch the Little Review alongside the Review, frequently filling the former with pungent and entertaining answers to readers’ questions: Here’s a Gentleman tells us his Mistress and He are upon equal Terms, and yet she won’t have him! – A strange thing truly, and very unkind! – But then, Sir, must it needs be, that because your Mistresses Age, Fortune and other Circumstances are pretty much alike, that therefore she must have you, and can have no Reasons against it? – Perhaps she don’t like you, or perhaps she likes some body else, whose Age, Fortunes and Circumstances agree as well as yours; and if she is not at liberty to choose, then, Sir, she is no more your Mistress but you are her Master: Therefore, Sir, all your Arguments of that sort, are very odd ones. (Little Review, 12, 13 July 1705, quoted in McBain 2016: 81) Periodicals such as Defoe’s Little Review and Steele and Addison’s Tatler and Spectator were targeting a new market and readership that had first been tapped by John Dunton’s Athenian Mercury (1691–7) and Ladies Mercury (1693). Indeed, in his memoirs, and in umbrage for how his ideas had been copied by the author of the Review, Dunton wrote of Defoe in 1705 that ‘he continues to pick my pocket’ ([1705]

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Figure I.6  Index of topics in bound volume of past issues of the Athenian Mercury, 1693 (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin)

2014: 424). The periodicals were so popular that past issues would be bound together and sold in separate volumes with an index of the topics (see Plate 1 and Figure I.6). This new readership included ever more women readers who within the space of a few years had become the periodicals’ ‘key constituencies’ (Batchelor and Powell 2018: 3). The launch of the Female Tatler in 1709 was emblematic of this audience shift. Unlike Dunton’s Ladies Mercury, which ran for just four numbers, and the annual Ladies’ Diary: or, the Woman’s Almanack (1704–1841), the Female Tatler (1709–10) came out three times a week for a total of 111 numbers. According to the periodical’s headnote, the first fifty-­two numbers were written by Mrs Phoebe Crackenthorpe, ‘a Lady that knows everything’. As the description implies, Crackenthorpe, the eidolon adopted by the female author Delarivier Manley, was unashamedly learned, though the periodical derived its success from the dual focus on learning, especially classical literature, and gossip (Wood 2018: 31–2).

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introduction 21 Consisting of a single small folio sheet, it rode and exploited the popularity of its male counterpart, though simultaneously rebutting any possible sexist notion that for its own publication to be successful its author must necessarily be a man too: Whereas several ill-­bred critics have reported about town that a woman is not the author of this paper, which I take to be a splenetic and irrational aspersion upon our whole sex, women were always allow’d to have a finer thread of understanding than men, which made them have recourse to learning, that they might equal our natural parts, and by an arbitrary sway have kept us from many advantages to prevent our out-­vying them; but those ladies who have imbib’d authors, and div’d into arts and sciences have ever discover’d a quicker genius, and more sublime notions. These detractors cou’d never gain admittance to the fair sex, and all such I forbid my drawing room. (Female Tatler, no. 11, July 29–1 August 1709) Although Dunton, Defoe, Steele and Addison had already set about courting women readers, or ‘fair-­ sexing’ to use Swift’s pejorative parlance, the Female Tatler was the first long-­running periodical to explicitly refer to women as its primary readers. The title assumed a gender difference in readership that would be picked up later by other publications. These included the Ladies Journal (1727) and the Female Spectator (1744–6) as well as women’s magazines from the mid-­century onwards, which co-­opted the language of fair-­sexing in their very titles (Batchelor and Powell 2018: 5); for example, Lady’s Magazine; or Polite Companion for the Fair Sex (1759–63) and Lady’s Magazine; or Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex (1770–1832). However, as Rebecca Shapiro makes clear in Chapter 17 of this present volume, women not only participated in the periodical press as readers and writers, they were also editors and printers both in London and beyond.

1730 and the Grub-Street Journal Right from the early seventeenth century, critics of the nascent news culture had derided and lampooned people’s indiscriminate appetite for news. In Ben Jonson’s satire The Staple of Newes (1626), this compulsive hunger or ‘itch’ is exemplified by Peniboy, who announces to the master of the ­staple – ­where the news can be ­bought – ­that he wants to buy ‘any kind’ of news, ‘so it be newes, the newest that thou hast’ (III.ii.19). This irrational obsession with new information and facts is

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similarly satirised in Addison and Steele’s Spectator at the beginning of the eighteenth century. In this particular case the satire comes in the form of a fictitious letter in which the reader informs ‘Mr Spectator’ that men who frequent coffee-­houses, and delight in news, are pleased with every thing that is matter of fact, so it be what they have not heard before. A victory, or a defeat, are equally agreeable to them. The shutting of a cardinal’s mouth pleases them one post, and the opening of it another. (Spectator, 8 August 1712) These satires rightly underline two essential features of early modern news: it had to be both new and factually based. The readers’ need for news could be social, commercial or political, or a mixture of all three, but whatever the reader’s individual reasons the news writers and publishers did what they could to get out fact-­based news. In this prevailing ‘Culture of Fact’ (Shapiro 2000), news publishers sought and published facts wherever they were to be found, but in doing so they recognised themselves that what they found and what they published might be contradictory and confusing. The London Gazette stated as much in news about Moscow: ‘our advices from Moskow are every post so various and different, that in the whole we know not what to credit’ (13–17 July 1671), while Nedham too had to accept the vagaries of news provision in his account of events in the Mediterranean in 1653: In regard my materials are not so punctuall as were necessary for the making up of an intire exact Relation according to the dignity of the subiect, in all the Particulars; therfore, you must take things as they come represented in parcells from severall hands; which being added to what was published in the last, you may by collecting all together, have a sight (in some measure) of the late successe and Victory. (Mercurius Politicus, 24 February–3 March 1653) Providing fact-­based news was not easy, and trying to piece it together if you were the reader could be difficult too, especially if the news publications themselves made little attempt to sort out truth from rumour, rumour from lies, logic from absurdity, and objectivity from party partisanship. Which facts were true and how could you tell which of the multiple versions of an event was the correct one? The Spectator also commented on this in the above-­mentioned issue of 8 August 1712:

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introduction 23 All of them [newspapers] receive the same advices from abroad, and very often in the same words; but their way of cooking it is so different, that there is no citizen, who had an eye to the public good, that can leave the coffee house with peace of mind, before he has given every one of them a reading. (Spectator, 8 August 1712) It was this situation that the weekly Grub-Street Journal (1730– 37) inventively addressed in its own reporting of the week’s news. Describing it as a ‘new method’, the newspaper decided upon a compilation of news collected ‘from all the Papers of the preceding week; with short Remarks Serious and Comical, shewing the BEAUTIES, the DIFFERENCES, and the MISTAKES which occur in them’ (Harris 1987: 160). Instead of providing its own news, the Grub-Street Journal (GSJ), selected news dispatches from eight London newspapers, indicating the name of the publication at the end of the news item. As seen below, the selected news dispatches could be wide ranging, in this case including traditional hard news, society gossip and games of tennis. DOMESTIC NEWS. C. Courant. EP. Evening Post P. Post-Boy. SJ. S. James’s Evening Post. DP. Daily Post. WE. Whitehall Evening P. DJ. Daily Journal. LE. London Evening Post. THURSDAY, July 20. On tuesday a great match was play’d at Tennis, for 500 guineas, between the R. Hon. the L. James Cavendish and Mr. Bladen, at the King’s Tennis Court in the Haymarket; but the same being equal, is to be play’d over again. C. This morning the R. Hon. the Lady Gage, accompany’d by Mrs Osborn, daughter to the L. Vice. Torrington, set out for Paris for 6 weeks, to visit her daughter, who lies ill there. DP. Dover, July 16. Yesterday the R. Hon. Lord Arundel of Wardour, and some of his children landed here, as did also the Lord Herbert from Calais. WE. LE. Thomas Beastly, Esq: is made Collector of his Majesty’s Customs in Pensilvania, in the room of William-­Erdman Fox, Esq; deceased. DJ. Yesterday a Court of Directors was held at the Bank of England, when Mr. Hunt, who had disqualify’d himself some time since, was rechosen a Director. DP.

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On tuesday night, about 10, a person very well dress’d, came to the white horse inn in Fleet street, to lodge, pretending he had just come off a journey; he had a tit-­bit for supper, and having regal’d himself with a bottle of wine, retir’d to his chamber, and made off in the morning before any of the family were stirring, taking the sheets and pillow biers with him. S. J. (Grub-Street Journal, 27 July 1732) For the first three years this method of news presentation, likened to an ‘Aggregation’ in a bibliographic sense (Slauter 2016: 372; see also Howard 2012), was very successful, not least because the succession of cited news items was interspersed with humorous comment on not just the news itself but also the news culture of which it was part. Frequently making fun of its competitors, and using the essay part of the newspaper both trenchantly and provocatively, GSJ caught public attention. A rival publication, Weekly Register, reluctantly admitted that it was ‘universally condemn’d, and yet universally read’ (8 July 1732). The “Differences” to which GSJ drew attention often regarded contradictory news such as somebody’s erroneously reported death: There is no privilege in which the authors of our Daily and Weekly Papers may more justly glory than that of the power of life and death. Whom they will they send to the grave, and whom they will they restore to life a­ gain . . . T ­ hus there is hardly a campaign, in which there are not several generals killed by the hands of these gentlemen, and after some time, surprisingly brought again into the field of battle. (19 December 1734) The ‘Mistakes’ could involve a lazy, incorrect use of language (‘This is an odd mixture of English, Italian, and Latin, and is scarce any of the three’, 6 January 1732) or an ­apparent – ­and h ­ umorous – ­inability to understand social reality: ‘On Sunday ­last – ­Bridges, Esq: was married to Mrs. Knight, a widow Gentlewoman of fine accomplishments, with a fortune of 10,000 l. Courant. This is tautology, 10,000 l. are such’ (30 April 1732). The GSJ folded in 1737 because by then London weekly newspapers had been superseded by dailies, but in its heyday GSJ’s ‘mode of compiling, juxtaposing, and commenting on the news was unique’ (Slauter 2016: 372). Through the eidolon of ­Quidnunc – ­ a news ­ addict – ­Richard Russel, the editor and primary writer of GSJ, provided a highly readable and entertaining news digest that helped readers to manage

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introduction 25 an ever increasing news flow which could sometimes confuse as much as it could inform.

1789–93 It was not just William Wordsworth who awoke to bliss at the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789. The triumphant ideals of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, which emblazoned the discourse and writings in France, were also exuberantly taken up by not a few newspapers on the other side of the English Channel and Irish Sea. One such paper was Dublin’s Saunders’s News-Letter, which joyfully looked forward to how France could gain the same rights and values already enshrined in the British Constitution: The French nation will enjoy every privilege of the boasted British ­constitution . . . ­This is a period in modern history that could scarcely be expected to have happened this century, which must afford sincere pleasure to every citizen in the world, and every friend to the rights of ­mankind – ­no longer will the expressions of Gallic Slavery be proverbial, nor will the people wear the fetters of arbitrary and despotic authority. (Saunders’s News-Letter, 10 July 1789) For other newspapers and periodical publications, however, patriotic self-­celebration was out of place and wilfully blind. For them the winds of change emanating from France had to lead to urgent reforms in their own democratic process. These appeals for reform were not only espoused by titles in the traditional press but also by a range of new kinds of publications that gave voice to writers and readers who before had been unheard. Barker refers to this as a ‘new type of print culture which was both democratic and demotic’ (Barker 2000: 176). On the back of Thomas Paine’s hugely popular The Rights of Man (1791–92), two writers to engage with the radical press were Thomas Spence and Daniel Isaac Eaton. The first created the penny periodical Pig’s Meat or Lessons for the Swinish Multitude (1793–95), so called after Edmund Burke’s phrase in Reflections on the Revolution in France: ‘learning will be cast into the mire and trodden down under the hoofs of a swinish multitude’ (Burke 1790, III: 335). Eaton’s title, Politics for the People; Or, a Salmagundy for Swine (1793–95), also reflected outrage at Burke’s epithet, which although originally used in relation to the French revolutionaries had been strategically recontextualised by the English radicals for their own cause (Bartel 1969: 4).

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Both Spence’s and Eaton’s publications adopt popular forms of spoken English, making use of a wide range of styles. In Spence’s case this included millenarian discourse, where he exploited ‘the languages of popular enthusiasm and Old Testament prophecy’ (Wood 2009: 839). The compelling orality is seen in the following call to arms in the first edition of Pig’s Meat (1793): Awake! Arise! Arm yourselves with truth, justice, reason. Lay siege to corruption. Claim as your inalienable right, universal suffrage and annual parliaments. And whenever you have the gratification to choose a representative, let him be from among the lower orders of men, and he will know how to sympathize with you. Spence and Eaton reflected and disseminated an ultra-­radical politics that caught the public’s eye, and for which it was crushed. Not only did the government, under William Pitt, prosecute the radical press for seditious libel, but the formidable conservative press, invigorated by the growing French menace, also rose up to defend the status quo. This pamphlet war of the early 1790s between the reforming and radical press on the one hand and conservative newspapers on the other was won by the latter (Dickinson 1994: 272–4). However, although the first wave of radical publishing was defeated, and would only re-­emerge in 1815, it nevertheless played an important part in the late eighteenth-­century history of the press both for what it proclaimed and the debate and confrontation it aroused. The debate regarding the abolition of slavery was the other key issue to dominate news at the turn of the 1790s (Walvin 1982; Oldfield 1995). Newspapers both for and against abolition were filled with news, parliamentary speeches, editorial comment and readers’ letters promoting or otherwise a campaign that had succeeded in absorbing a wide range of publishing forms including the press to further its abolitionist goals (Barker 2000: 170–6; Wood 2009: 845). Heated, impassioned appeals and argument informed the campaigns of the press both in and outside London. The Times on 5 March 1788 had thundered: ‘Though the world be for slavery, the TIMES are for freedom. The struggle to emancipate the Negroes from chains, cruelty and base subordination, even though it should fail, would reflect honour on this country.’ In contrast, the anti-­abolition Gentleman’s Magazine published a letter from an anonymous West Indies planter which began ‘The scheme for the abolition of the slave trade is, in every view of it, absurd and impolitic. It is founded on a mistaken notion of humanity, or rather on ignorance, folly, and enthusiasm’ (59, 1, 1789, 334). The letter then continues with ‘racist anti-­Black stereotypes to justify the system of slavery and the

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introduction 27 slave trade’, concluding with the proposal that the enslaved Africans be regarded as ‘assistant planters’ rather than ‘slaves’ (British Library 2021). Outside London, fiery polemic and contestation were often found in those towns such as Liverpool and Bristol whose economic well-­being was largely dependent on the trade. In these ports the local press had an important part in creating a forum for public debate around the issue. Two important anti-­slavery papers in Bristol were Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal and Bonner and Middleton’s Bristol Journal (Marshall 1968: 6), though in both Bristol and Liverpool the abolitionist newspaper campaign was closely monitored and countered by the strong pro-­slavery lobby. Although Britain’s participation in the French Revolutionary Wars (1793–1802) led to a lull in the abolitionist campaign there is no doubt it focused minds and attention on the deadly exploitation of peoples, eventually leading to the abolition of the British slave trade in 1806–7.

Chapter One

BUSINESS OF THE PRESS Nicholas Brownlees and David Finkelstein

Introduction This chapter will examine the business objectives and commercial forces that shaped the world of the British and Irish press. The business objectives and possibilities changed over the period as the periodical press transformed from the low-­circulating weekly newsbooks of the 1640s to the financially robust dailies, tri-­weekly and weekly papers of the late eighteenth century. What started out as a supplementary income for the news makers in ­question – ­be they publishers, printers, editors, news compilers or ­translators – ­developed into a commercial enterprise capable of providing significant financial reward even if it was not evenly divided between the various participants. In general, it was newspaper proprietors who would accumulate wealth, social prestige and political influence, whereas printers, compositors, distributors and news writers benefited to a much smaller degree from the increased financial potential of a successful news publication. The business of managing a news publication was complex. Apart from advertising, which became key to sustaining newspaper viability and profitability, news publishers also contended with business considerations such as the cost of paper, distribution (and the ways in which it could be improved), how many people to employ and, not least, punitive taxes on newspapers and how best to evade their full effect. All these matters, coupled with other operational considerations such as managing content, design and formats, had an impact on the newspaper’s price, sales and possible profits.

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Early Developments The possibility that a regular supply of print news could be profitable was recognised in the early 1620s with the first series of sequentially numbered news-­sheets or corantos. In 1622 a five-­person syndicate of individual printers who had previously published occasional news pamphlets teamed up to publish a coranto in the expectation of financial gain (Raymond 2003: 132–3). News had become the new social commodity: everyone wanted to read the latest information on events, and even if corantos were restricted to reporting foreign news, there was strong interest in relevant events such as the fast-­developing Thirty Years War, which it was hoped would lead to Protestant victories against the Catholic imperial forces. The news syndicate anticipated that with such imminent victories predicted, the market for corantos would undoubtedly increase, and their monopoly on foreign, serialised news circulation would become extremely profitable. For the syndicate, the financial outlay involved in printing a 24-­page quarto pamphlet more or less once a week would have seemed definitely worthwhile. However, the envisaged profits did not materialise, and by 1624 the syndicate had broken up. Protestant involvement in the politics of the moment, including England’s own indirect connection through James I’s daughter’s marriage to the Elector Palatine of the Rhine, had proven unsuccessful, and there was very poor international news to report. Thomas Gainsford, principal editor of corantos from 1622 to 1624, implicitly admitted this in an editorial address to the reader. ‘I confesse your hearts are euen sadded at the first view,’ he wrote, ‘when you thinke you shall reade of nothing, but the happie proceedings of the Emperour’ (Newes of Europe, 12 March 1624). Corantos continued to be published, but in diminished form as sales dwindled and overheads were cut. It was only in 1630, when the Protestant king Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden began to win important victories in northern Europe, that coranto news sales picked up. Ironically, it was this new positive trend that led once more to the temporary undoing of serialised foreign news in 1632. Charles I appeared to have viewed the positive news coming out of northern Europe as casting a shadow over his own ambivalent foreign policy and subsequently banned corantos until 1638. When corantos ­returned – ­and only after the publishers Nicholas Bourne and Nathaniel Butter agreed to contribute to the annual funding of St Paul’s C ­ athedral – r­ eadership interest in Europe was fast overtaken by concerns about events happening in Britain and Ireland. Corantos continued to be published until early 1642, but what reignited readers’ interests in print news, and made

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the periodical press profitable, was the looming ‘threat to civil order’ (Raymond 2003: 151). Readers once again proved eager to learn about the fast-­changing political events then unfolding, and Charles I no longer had the authority to suppress such reporting. The result was the publication on 29 November 1641 of The Heads of Severall Proceedings in this Present Parliament, the first of a vast number of weekly news pamphlets launched to report on domestic affairs. Many of these fell by the wayside almost immediately, but others lasted a number of years. As a result, newsbooks became plentiful, and key to placing ‘information and analysis within reach of a much broader political nation’ (Peacey 2013: 30). Readership extended beyond London, though it is not easy to determine who exactly was reading what and where, given that extant private library catalogues from the period only provide a partial picture, as they do not include information on readers who had little intention of preserving and collecting their purchases (Peacey 2013: 42–3). Apart from the dry but solid newsbook A Perfect Diurnall, two other standout publications of the 1640s were Mercurius Aulicus and Mercurius Britanicus. Though representing opposing political views, they each possessed two key features for a successful publication: expert news writers and first-­rate information sources. The royalists’ newsbook Mercurius Aulicus, which began publication in January 1643 under the editorship of John Berkenhead, was printed in Oxford, tactically established there as a result of Charles I having set up base in the town in 1642. Employing pungent irony, wit and invective, Berkenhead ferociously attacked parliamentarian newsbooks and steadfastly upheld the royalist cause, making good use of his Oxford network of royal advisors to bring to Aulicus an aura of news authority. Aulicus did not outlast the royalists’ defeat at the battle of Naseby in 1645, but in its heyday, parliamentarians complained that it had done ‘more hurt than 2,000 of the king’s soldiers’ (quoted in Peacey 2013: 98). Parliament followed with its own political vehicle, the weekly serial Mercurius Britanicus, which Marchamont Nedham first co-­authored in 1643 and then fully authored in 1644. Considered the foremost news writer of the English revolution, Nedham made excellent use of his parliamentarian connections and inherent journalistic skills to rebut Aulicus, promote the parliamentarian cause and achieve commendable weekly circulation figures of between 750 and 1,000 copies (Black 2001: 5). Nedham would shift alliances several times over the following decade, moving first to write and develop Mercurius Pragmaticus, a Charles I royalist-­ backed newsbook in which he excoriated his

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business of the press 31 previous parliamentary backers and their Scottish allies for conspiring against the king. Following Charles’s execution in January 1649, and a stint in Newgate Prison, Nedham pragmatically repented of his ways and began Mercurius Politicus in 1650, backed by parliamentary funding. It, and another mid-­week publication of Nedham’s, The Publick Intelligencer, would survive Cromwell’s crackdown on London papers in 1655, but on the eve of the Restoration in 1660 Nedham felt it prudent to go into hiding, most probably in Holland. The first newsbooks in Scotland were Heads of Severall Proceedings and Diurnal Occurrances in 1641–2. The latter was a Leith reprint of the London publication and does not seem to have continued beyond two issues. Nine years later the first Scottish newsbook appeared in the form of Mercurius Scoticus (Spurlock 2011: 200). Printed and published in Leith, it was, however, ‘produced by Englishmen for Englishmen’ (Couper 1908, I: 58) and would be suppressed by English commissioners within six months of its launch. In 1659 another Leith-­ based publication was established to provide news for the English army in Scotland, entitled The Faithfull Intelligencer from the Parliaments Army in Scotland. Though funded by English sources, it did not last long in the aftermath of regime change. Ireland’s first news publication as such, backed by the Cromwellian army based in Cork, was the Irish Monthly Mercury, issued between December 1649 and February 1650. Though lacking in urgency in terms of updated news, its stated aims, as outlined in its first edition, linked political economy, commerce and information: ‘It is but just that the People should have news for their Money, and that they should hear, as well as feel the effects of their Taxes’ (quoted in Morash 2010: 22). In the decades following the constitutional crises of the 1650s, English, Scottish and Irish news-­sheets of less clout eschewed politics, focusing on providing unfiltered news commentary, but with some hints of political affiliations evident in the type of advertising accepted and featured, which could favour individuals and enterprises with locally known political allegiances. The 1662 Licensing Act, which required all print to receive prior authorisation from a Surveyor of the Press, installed Sir Roger L’Estrange as gatekeeper of English press outputs. L’Estrange would be ousted in 1665, and over the next fourteen years his successor, Joseph Williamson, would control the only official broadsheet newspaper permitted and funded by the government, the London Gazette. Such early examples demonstrate the link between official sponsorship and government subsidies in propping up and sustaining early

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news-­sheets. Whereas in England, Parliament used legal and censoring means to control and regulate newspaper production, in Scotland such oversight was managed by the Scots Privy Council, which until its dissolution in 1708 tightly controlled who and what was published. In Ireland no such restrictions existed, but press development was less pronounced through to the late seventeenth century, due in part to infrastructural challenges and the lack of a strong readership base outside of main conurbations such as Dublin. In 1663 there were only three major post roads in Ireland, hindering circulation of information and material, as well as the ability to gather news from mainland British sources. Not until the 1680s would Irish newspapers (mainly based in Dublin) start developing as viable concerns. Titles extant for longer than a few issues included the Dublin Intelligence (in play from September 1690 to October 1693), followed in turn by the Flying Post, launched in March 1699 and lasting into the 1720s (Morash 2010: 31). These titles were generally four pages in length, and dependent for news on professional letter writers based overseas, or on references gathered from London and regional news sources. Irish printers’ income throughout the 1700s depended less on the domestic periodical press than on lucrative work issuing pirate editions and reprints of London-­printed works. During the eighteenth century annual Irish profits in the print trade grew exponentially, particularly through the production of pirate texts and seditious pamphlets smuggled between Scotland and Ireland, with annual trade growth of 3.5 per cent per year between 1750 and 1800 (Brown and McDougall 2012: 202). The legal loopholes that permitted Irish reprinting of legitimate texts would be closed off after Ireland’s incorporation into the Union in 1801. Newspapers in both countries featured book advertising in their pages as either income-­generating or as part of exchange agreements between printers and machinery and print workers, and agents travelled over borders through well-­established networks. In light of business interest in cross-­border sailings, Scottish newspapers also featured shipping news prominently on their back pages, alongside shipping advertisements bearing engravings of the ships under discussion (Brown 2012: 354). The cross-­border business interchange this supported was exemplified in the example of James Magee, Dublin printer and owner of the Dublin Evening Post. Magee had strong connections with Scotland, purchasing scientific and medical books from Edinburgh connections and type from the Glasgow-­based firm Alexander Wilson and Sons. He also acted as agent for Scottish publishers, and on occasion was asked to place ads in Irish papers for new works, as when the Edinburgh

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business of the press 33 publisher Charles Elliot, seeking to promote his new catalogue in Dublin newspapers, wrote to him in 1783: ‘How many Capital papers have you and their Charge’ and ‘how much it general Takes to Advertise a Book &c’ (quoted in Brown and McDougall 2012: 199). Such Irish and Scottish regional connections acted as a counterbalance to London print dominance throughout the eighteenth century, and as James Phillips would note, during this period ‘the Dubliners’ awareness of their extra-­legal position, and of the advantages to be derived from it, was one of the basic factors in the growth of the Dublin print trade’ (Phillips 1998: 107). Under Oliver Cromwell’s rule in the 1650s, control of the press tightened to create a state monopoly on news production overseen by an official government censor. The Printing Act of 1662 transferred press oversight to Parliament, with subsequent attempts to shape what was printed and by whom. But the lapse of the Printing Act in 1695 and subsequent taxation tactics used by government to manage news outputs did not always go the way some government sources wished. In such cases, political figures sought more direct means of control through payrolling, buying out, taking over and reshaping particularly opposing press sources to become vehicles for political propaganda. In the early eighteenth century the Tory minister, Robert Harley, made good use of the journalistic skills of Daniel Defoe to promote his government’s policies (Downie [1979] 2008). Reconciling his Whig beliefs with his role as undisclosed government propagandist and occasional spy, Defoe promulgated the government’s cause in his Weekly Review of the Affairs of France (1704–13). In the next decades between 1722 and 1736, one of the more astute politicians of the century, Robert Walpole, spent over £50,000 sponsoring eight newspapers, with a view to ensuring that he had on tap ‘some discreet writer of the Government’s s­ ide . . . t­o state facts right’ (quoted in Targett 1994: 290). Walpole also involved himself in organising, producing and at times writing for such papers. The Pitt administration of the 1790s was equally extravagant in its sponsorship, though much of this was parcelled out surreptitiously and under secret agreements. By 1792, following the early years of the French Revolution, the English treasury was spending no less than £5,000 a year controlling the London press and political writers of the period, forming one of three major forms of income that proprietors and journalists put against their expenditures. Among notable press examples benefiting from such largesse were the Diary or Woodfall’s Register, which received £400; The Times, in annual receipt of £300; and the St James’s

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Evening Chronicle, the London Evening Post, the Whitehall Evening Post and the Oracle, which each received £200. William Cobbett was the recipient of government largesse to the tune of £3,000 to launch the daily Porcupine in 1800 (which quickly folded), and the Treasury suborned the editor of the Morning Herald in 1790 either to choose a period in prison or to shift political tone by leasing his paper to the government for £600 a year. Pragmatics trumped politics, and he opted for the latter offer (Anon. 1935: 61; Koss 1990: 366; Pettegree 2014: 368).

The Financial Importance of Advertising to a Newspaper’s Success The removal of onerous legal restrictions on news production in England in 1695 would extend to Scotland following the Union of the two countries in 1707. The result was an unregulated expansion of newspaper, pamphlet and other printed material production that drew heavily on advertising to remain viable. Ad revenues allowed newspapers and other forms of periodicals to break free of political control and pressure from sponsored support sources. This income enabled many eighteenth-­century newspapers to avoid government oversight and become independent influences. They would use alternative revenue sources to fund provision of content that brought government actions to the attention of citizen readers, free of political and government subsidies and overt control. From the early 1700s onwards, contemporary newspapers and other periodical formats energetically embraced advertising as a major income source. Daniel Defoe wrote on this point in 1705, noting it was ‘apparent the Principal Support of all the Publick Papers now on Foot, depends upon the Advertisements; a­ nd . . . ­most of them could not bear their own Charge without them’ (Review, 7 July 1705). Readers found them fascinating for what they revealed about society. As Joseph Addison commented in 1710, ads often competed in terms of interest with the actual news of the day: It is my custom in a Dearth of News to entertain my self with those Collections of Advertisements that appear at the End of all our publick Prints. These I consider as Accounts of News from the little World, in the same Manner that the foregoing Parts of the Paper are from the great. (Tatler, 14 September 1710) Advertising was closely associated with the popularity of coffee houses in the late seventeenth century and first part of the eighteenth century.

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business of the press 35

Figure 1.1  An advertisement for one of the first published accounts of the Salem witch trials, Athenian Gazette, 3 January 1692/3 (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin)

They acted as drop-­off and collection points for those either wishing to leave an advertisement or to pick up a reward announced in one. For example, anyone interested in placing an ad in the General Advertiser in November 1744 was informed in the issue of 26 November that ‘Advertisements are taken in for this Paper, at Lloyd’s Coffee House, in Lombard Street’. The popular conviviality of coffee houses clearly benefited the diffusion of advertisements, with the clientele animatedly discussing and examining all that was to be found in the newspapers laid out on the tables in front of them. Two of the most influential writers to place coffee houses at the forefront of metropolitan culture, and to benefit substantially from the advertising income their periodicals contained, were Richard Steele and Joseph Addison, authors of the Tatler (1709–11) and the Spectator (1711–12). The first number of the Tatler (12 April 1709) sets the stage for the discussion of news and contemporary society, with coffee houses named as the news sources from which their journalistic persona ‘Isaac Bickerstaff Esq’

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Figure 1.2  A letter to the editor in a bound volume of the Lounger, 1785 (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin)

collected information. Within this narrative framework the Tatler delighted its readers and made a healthy profit. Selling at just a penny, it derived much of its revenue from advertisements, which it ‘vigorously pursued and gave a great deal of space to’, including up to eighteen advertisements an issue (Pettegree 2014: 276). The content and style of the Tatler and Spectator were to prove influential, and many an eighteenth-­century periodical, including Edinburgh’s the Mirror (1779) and the Lounger (1785) (see Figure 1.2), were to follow their example. Local news and ads were signature elements in newspaper columns. By 1750 up to 75 per cent of space in many daily newspapers was devoted to advertisements. The types of ads featured changed over the century as British and Irish mercantile bases expanded. Initially, advertisements were sourced from a narrow range of businesses, a majority of which were booksellers advertising their latest publications. This changed by mid-­century as new business opportunities arose for self-­promotion.

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business of the press 37 A good example of such changes in business viability can be seen in the advertising records of the Edinburgh Evening Courant (founded in 1718), covering the 1730s through the 1780s. Recent analysis of these records offers valuable insight into more general trade trends (Brown 2012: 361–3). The Courant featured a handful of ads in the 1720s, averaging ten per issue. These were typically bookselling ads. Subsequent decades saw major jumps in ad numbers and range. By 1760 the Edinburgh Evening Courant, having shifted from a four-­to-­six-­page quarto issue in the 1720s to a four-­page folio issue in the 1760s, was setting aside two of its four pages solely for ads. By 1790 it would regularly feature seventy to eighty advertisements per issue (Cowan 1946: 5–6; Brown 2012: 363). The types of ads expanded by mid-­century to include local property advertisements, government announcements of farming and flax prices and land auctions, retail promotions, trade items and shipping events. By the 1770s these included advertisements for medicines and jobs, entertainment notices, coach and post schedules, local meetings, personal ads, and shipping, banking and mercantile announcements (Brown 2012: 362). Over half of the advertisements in the Courant at this time were linked to property sales and letting. By 1778, when over 15,000 advertisements were placed in Edinburgh newspapers that year alone, the Courant accounts showed it netting several hundred pounds in annual profit from such sources (Brown 2012: 362). While most newspapers featured ads with a local focus, it was common for agents to negotiate advertising space from other regions in dominant newspapers. The Edinburgh Evening Courant records numerous examples of booksellers from Glasgow and Aberdeen paying for ads that ranged from obituary notices and notification of marriage banns to bankruptcies and changes in business proprietorship (Brown 2012: 362). It was recognised that, with newspapers embedded in communities as key sources of information and opinion, they were becoming important avenues for advertising goods, services and mercantile necessities to relevant audiences. By the end of the eighteenth century, despite government interventions and attempts to mould, restrict and control such commercially driven, non-­official opinion-­forming sources, newspapers were a ubiquitous part of English, Scottish and Irish social and cultural frameworks. (Welsh imprints would follow suit in the nineteenth century.) Such roles created new pressures on owners based around readership, community and mercantilist interests. Newspaper proprietors now had to take into account the communities and readers they served, and the merchants from whom they solicited advertising. Both could threaten

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viability either by not subscribing to or by withdrawing ads from the paper. The importance of advertising revenue to newspaper and journal sustainability would also find material expression in the frequent use of the word ‘advertiser’ in newspaper titles, with several examples of name changes in response to the increasing financial interdependence between mercantile interests and newspaper viability. In Ireland, the first half of the eighteenth century saw a number of examples of this approach in practice. A Dublin paper launched in 1736, for example, with the express purpose of attracting advertising, proudly proclaimed itself the Dublin Daily Advertiser. Entrepreneurial print specialist Francis Joy followed suit in Belfast in 1737 with the Belfast News-Letter, and General Advertiser. When the Dublin Daily Advertiser ceased publication in 1738, its place was taken by the Dublin Daily Post, and General Advertiser, which stated ad prices and extended terms by which it sought to reach target audiences. It also included notice of robust attempts to circulate news-­sheets through public postings, ‘(that it might be read by all Degrees of People) on the Gates of our University, the Custom-­House, the Tholsel, the Market-­House, and other Publick Places’ (Munter 1967: 62).

Regional Newspaper Expansion Prior to the 1695 lapse of the Printing Act, there were no known long-­ running examples of regional papers extant in Scotland, England and Wales, due to the stranglehold of London-­based regulation and English and Scottish government control and oversight. In the first decades of the eighteenth century, papers appeared in a handful of towns such as Norwich, Bristol and Exeter. By the 1720s over twenty English regional newspapers were in production. In Scotland, key publications launched during this period included the Glasgow Courant in 1715, issued thrice weekly, the weekly Edinburgh Evening Courant in 1718, and the Caledonian Mercury in 1720. Not until 1748 would the far north of Scotland see a substantial newspaper presence in the form of the weekly Aberdeen Journal, founded by James Chalmers. It had competition from the Aberdeen Intelligencer between 1752 and 1757, when Chalmers bought out its owners after the county of Aberdeen’s Commissioners of Supply suggested that individuals ‘who had occasion to advertise’ would be better served with one paper, since they ‘would save half the expense of said advertisement’ (quoted in Brown 2012: 356).

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business of the press 39 During the first half of the eighteenth century, Irish newspapers began to emerge, funded by booksellers and agents. The majority of new starts were concentrated in Dublin, with the bulk of their circulation derived from advertising and city subscriptions. Not until 1715 do we see the first regional paper emerge with the launch of the Cork Idler. As Robert Munter points out, further regional developments proved slow to come, with only seventeen provincial titles started between 1715 and 1760, of which only three, the Belfast News-Letter, and General Advertiser, the Cork Evening Post and the Limerick Journal, lasted beyond a year (Munter 1967: 16). In contrast, by 1760 over 160 papers had been launched in Dublin, with over a third lasting beyond a year of launch (Munter 1967: 16). English provincial-­ based press publications, on the other hand, more than doubled in the first half of the century, from twenty in 1720 to over forty in 1750, and by 1800 had topped seventy. Like Dublin, London remained a capital for press output, though with less abundant press launches over the century, likewise supported by shareholding quangos of booksellers and agents joining together to finance and manage such enterprises. Such abundance of interest saw repetitious complaints over the decades of news saturation. As Hannah Barker notes, one 1719 paper grouchily complained that ‘at present both city, town and country, are over-­flowed every day with an inundation of newspapers’, only to be echoed fourteen years later by similar testy exclamations in the British Observator of 1733 that ‘it is grown a general complaint that there are already such a glut of newspapers and weekly pamphlets’ (quoted in Barker 2000: 29). Press numbers oscillated upwards in strong fashion in London and regional centres through to the end of the century: London saw newspaper numbers rise from twelve in 1712 to eighteen in 1750 (six weeklies, six tri-­ weeklies, six dailies), twenty-­two in 1790, and fifty-­two by 1811 (Barker 2000: 29–30). Wales came late to the newspaper and periodical press revolution. The origins of the Welsh press date back to 1735 and a short-­ lived attempt by Lewis Morris to launch a newspaper in Holyhead, Anglesey, followed by a 1770 launch by Josiah Rees of Trysorfa Gwybodaeth, neu Eurgrawn Cymraeg. More successful were launches in the 1790s (following French revolutionary fervour) of a number of Welsh titles (Jones 1993: 1). The nineteenth century would see Welsh press advances, on which Aled Gruffydd Jones has written extensively (Jones 1993; 2020). Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries British and Irish governments attempted to control and manage information

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flowing outwards by blunt instruments such as structural taxes on production and advertising and legal restrictions through libel laws. When unregulated newspaper numbers began to rise exponentially in the early 1700s, the British government sought to tamp down supply by pushing through the 1712 Stamp Act. The Act imposed taxes on pamphlets of 2 shillings per sheet, and taxed newspapers in various ways: full sheets were taxed at 1 penny per sheet, or a half a penny per half-­ sheet, while an ad tax of 1 shilling was imposed on every advertisement carried. There were practical as well as political reasons for the Act, not least the seeking of extra revenue to fund overseas wars (among them the long-­drawn-­out Peninsular Wars of the period). Such impositions spurred shifts in production to expand paper sizes, with a number of papers doubling from small pamphlet printings to large folio sizes, moves to increase to six-­page weeklies, shrinking of type sizes to fit more text on to a sheet, and shifting where financially necessary to weekly as opposed to single-­leaf dailies or thrice-­weekly printings. The revised Stamp Act of 1725 further sought to close extant loopholes by applying taxation measures to all papers of whatever length and size. The 1743 Stamp Act attacked unstamped news outputs directly by restricting and banning the use of street vendors as point of sale. This had a dramatic impact on street-­based distribution of illegal news productions. Further Acts hiked up press taxes in 1757, 1776, 1789 and 1797. The form of the press was materially shaped through such means, and as Michael Harris notes, ‘tax proved in the long run the determining element in the physical development of the English newspaper’ (1978: 86). Not all government interventions were so punitive. Actions taken to support infrastructure and information circulation also benefited newspaper expansion. The vigorous building of military road networks across Scotland in the early eighteenth century to counteract Jacobite threats and improve military access to the Scottish hinterlands, alongside similar road extensions across the north of England, enabled a patchwork coach system to emerge servicing such areas. Postal service routes built on such services to expedite the circulation of London newspapers further afield, as well as supporting provincial paper distribution. The regional press tapped into such developments and distribution networks, employing agents charged with increasing the subscription base and managing distribution points. These would become quite extensive, as the York Mercury reminded its readers in 1724 when it listed its agents covering twenty-­one different towns in the region. Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal boasted in 1726 of a distribution network that ranged across ‘Devizes, Westbury, Sherbourn,

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business of the press 41 Shaston, Taunton, Bridgewater and Bath’ (quoted in Black 2001: 12). The 2 February 1734 issue of the Newcastle Courant included note of agents it used in Berwick and Tweedmouth to circulate news across the Tweed Valley (Black 2001: 12). Where clusters of subscribers lived away from accessible postal and coach routes, some agents used riders and wagons to distribute by hand along carefully mapped circuits and routes. This led at times to fiercely contested battles between rival papers seeking to dominate particular advertising regions and readership areas. This situation was exacerbated by the increasing reach of London papers. Given that newspapers were permitted through the Stamp Acts to circulate across the postal network free of charge if officially registered, opportunities arose for London clerks in state offices to become major conduits for London news circulation networks, acting as agents forwarding newsprint to customers in other parts of the country at reduced postal rates. Early in the eighteenth century, such tasks were entrusted to a committee of six Postal Office Clerks of the Roads, responsible for road services, and through whom London paper postings were routed. Their services were heavily used, with one parliamentary inquiry in 1764 revealing that over a seven-­day period in March alone, the Clerks handled circulation of over 20,000 London papers, mostly on favoured thrice-­weekly newspaper circulation days of Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday (Harris 1978: 89). In the 1760s such circulation privileges were also extended to MPs and registered individuals and commercial concerns. By 1771 almost 1,150 individuals were on the official lists, and statistics suggest that by 1782 around 60 per cent of the three million London newspaper issues circulated around the country were distributed via London agents. Such numbers increased over the next two decades: June 1789 accounts for postal circulations from London, for example, revealed that the average weekly circulation of London papers to external regions was 63,177 copies. One enterprising agent, Charles Delafoye, was recorded in 1794 as sending up to 500 papers a week to customers in Ireland, Scotland, Wales and sixteen English counties (Harris 1978: 89). By 1796 a staggering 8.6 million newspapers were being posted out of London each year (Gardner 2016: 31). Although the world of periodical print news in the eighteenth century was dominated numerically by men, ‘women were an essential presence in the periodical world from the very start, both as economic actors (as printers, distributors, and purchasers) and as objects’ (Batchelor and Powell 2018: 2). Widows sometimes took over the running of their deceased husbands’ printing presses, and they could

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have an important role in the street-­selling, or ‘hawking’, of news publications. In times of political tension this distribution role was not just seen passively. In a Dublin pamphlet of 1714, the writer warns of the hawkers’ potential for mischief and insurrection: ‘The medling with Hawkers and Ballad-­Singers may be thought a Trifle; but it ceases to be so, when we consider that the Crying and Singing such Stuff, as vile as it is, makes the Government familiar, and consequently contemptible to the People’ (quoted in McDowell 1998: 82). On occasion women also published periodical news in their own right. One woman to challenge the male predominance was Elizabeth Powell. A staunch Jacobite whose husband had died in 1716, she brought out three publications in her own name. The first was called the Orphan, the second, the Charitable Mercury and Female Intelligence, and the third, Orphan Reviv’d; or, Powell’s Weekly. Although all three publications were conceived as series, the first two titles never got beyond the first number, since on both occasions Powell was arrested and imprisoned for seditious libel after their publication. Powell’s third title, however, proved successful. Coming out as a weekly news journal, and in part edited, written and printed by Powell, it ran from November 1718 to March 1720. Generally consisting of six pages, Orphan Reviv’d would feature readers’ letters to ‘Mrs Powell’, a short essay, a selection of foreign and domestic news, and advertisements.

1750–1800 Proposed government hikes in advertisement and stamp duty in 1757 were met with protests from regional press sources. A key figure arguing the case for less tax was William Tayler, a regional news agent who orchestrated responses and represented the interests of a number of provincial newspapers. The result of such lobbying was mixed: while taxes rose in some areas, allied advertising duties were shelved. This increase in stamp duty meant a further general hike in the cost of newspapers to 2½d. This amounted to 10 per cent of an agricultural labourer’s weekly wage, 5 per cent of a London labourer’s, and 4 per cent of a craftsman’s (Barker 2000: 39). Although the cost of newspapers was generally too high for any but the middling and upper classes, by 1757 the possibilities for avoiding the stamp duty, as had been the case in the immediate post-­1712 decades, were much reduced. A 1743 Act had reinforced the government’s administrative means of enforcing its compliance, leading to the end of the various ingenious strategies devised to sell unstamped newspapers costing

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business of the press 43 a farthing or halfpenny in the 1730s. What had been important for the unstamped press was to hide the identity of its printers and distributors, as is made clear in this testimony by the author of the Daily Gazetteer in 1739. Referring first to printers, the news writer continued: their Hawkers or Carriers are no less adroit in evading Justice: To avoid being caught in selling or dispersing unstampt News Papers, they shall throw them in at the doors or Windows of their Customers, and reckon with them at leisure. Thus like the Thief and Receiver, are the Creditors of the Government pillag’d and cheated by the joint Craft of the Publisher and Reader. (quoted in Harris 1987: 29) This all changed, however, with the beefed-­up 1743 Act which not only set out new punishments for hawkers and printers but also established means for enforcing the measures. Not unrelated to the Stamp Acts, and the notion of ‘press for the few’, was the political crisis caused by John Wilkes’s prolonged confrontation with successive governments of the 1760s, the legal aspects of which are described in Chapter 3 of the present volume. The passions aroused by the confrontation led to a marked increase in circulation of both national and local press publications. The liberty of the press, politics and Wilkes’s self-­identification as the standard bearer of press freedom were top-­selling news topics of the decade. Wilkes’s campaign also contributed significantly to the government agreeing in 1771 to permit press reporting on parliamentary business. Rightly recognised as an important step in the democratic process, the hard-­fought victory had benefited from the support of many newspapers, though often the support had been motivated by commercial concerns rather than matters of democratic principle (Harris 1996: 41). Parliamentary reporting not only led to more space being devoted to political coverage, but also to the development of parliamentary reporting as a professional practice. However, the reporting was anything but an easy task. The government still imposed practical restrictions, such as a prohibition on taking notes in Parliament, or indeed providing seating for reporters. Nevertheless, the reports became an important part of a newspaper’s content, and as noted by an editor of 1782, ‘the speeches and ­debates . . . ­are of such importance, as to engross the greatest part of our newspapers, and necessarily become of utmost consequence to all our readers’ (quoted in Williams 2010: 71).

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This political focus, further sharpened by social and governmental responses to the French Revolution in 1789, paved the way for the radical press that emerged in the latter years of the century. Prolific English newspaper proprietors formed networks to advance their political message and to help one another in times of need. They circulated information among their respective titles and avoided competition with one another. A good example was Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the owner of the Watchman, who in 1796 decided against selling his paper in Sheffield, the home of the radical Sheffield Iris, because ‘I should injure the sale of the Iris, the editor of which (a very amiable and ingenius young man of the name of James Montgomery) is now in prison for a libel on a bloody-­minded magistrate there’ (quoted in Gardner 2016: 152). However, despite the network of trust that was forged, this first wave of the radical press flourished only briefly. The government effectively put newspapers out of business either by prosecuting proprietors or by starving papers of financial support (Barker 2000: 73; B. Harris 2005a: 51–3). The onset of war with France in 1793 also triggered a general wave of patriotic support throughout Britain and Ireland that further undermined the radical press’s potential readership. A second wave of radical papers appeared in the final years of the 1790s, but they were principally circumscribed to Ireland and England, though an outlier was the Albion (1799–1801), edited by a Scotsman, Allan Macleod, and also read in Glasgow (B. Harris 2005a: 59; Barnard, this volume). Over the last two decades of the century, the English press followed particular patterns of business development, shaped by external pressures exerted through government laws, taxes and local competition. These included hikes in duties applied to advertising, paper and sheet numbers, general but inconsistent use of libel and censorship laws, and financial barriers centred around start-­up costs and distribution systems. Start-­ up costs were high, though daily running costs could be reduced if you had an established printer in place to take on newspaper print work on extant machinery. In addition to funding new machinery, type, ink, paper and finishing work, there were costs associated with writing, editing, marketing, promoting and distributing news. When the owners of the Sheffield Register and Staffordshire Advertiser launched their newspapers in 1787 and 1795 respectively, start-­up costs were said to have been in excess of £700 (Gardner 2016: 72). The owners of the Salopian Journal spent in excess of £2,000 establishing their new paper around the same period. This sum included not just early running costs but extensive marketing, which included:

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business of the press 45 printing 10,000 initial handbills, 500 posting bills, 200 additional handbills, one visit to London, a further 7,000 handbills ‘fixing the publication of the first Paper’, 350 handbills ‘to post with Circular Letter to solicit Orders’, 75 posting bills ‘for Agents to take in Adverts’, 2,500 first edition gratis, advertisements in the London Sun, Morning Chronicle and the Star. (Gardner 2016: 72) Such start-­up costs drove many to band together in consortia partnerships to spread continuing costs evenly, usually in the form of shareholding investments. The majority of such newspaper ownership was concentrated among members of the book trade, often family-­based, and in regional areas often led by the town’s most prominent printers. Newspapers required a printer for a start, whether as partner or supplier of work, as well as individuals with specialised trade knowledge and connections. As Victoria Gardner has mapped out, a survey of provincial owners over a hundred-­year period covering 1720–1820 offers evidence of an overwhelming concentration of proprietorship among those with book trade expertise. Of the 305 proprietors surveyed, over 80 per cent were printers or were involved in various book trade areas. Others included political figures and groups seeking outlets for promoting policies and agendas, agents involved in stamp and postal offices, and figures involved in advertising and promotion (Gardner 2016: 75–6). Once start-­up costs were dealt with, production costs proved fairly sustainable. The weekly cost of producing the (daily) Times newspaper in 1794, for example, was estimated to be around £156 6s 10d, taking into account outlays in paper, stamp taxes and production wages. Sales figures against 12,000 copies per week brought in £171 17s 0d, generating an annual profit of over £725, from which further deductions were required to cover general administration, correspondence and reporter fees and ancillary costs (Anon. 1935: 40–3). Nevertheless, after advertising and other income sources were factored in, profits from successful news journals could be significant. One estimate of George Faulkner’s Dublin Journal advertising revenue, for example, suggested that by the late 1740s it was bringing in around £900 a year, which even with costs of printing subtracted represented a tidy sum. Unsurprisingly, papers such as Faulkner’s Dublin Journal (see Figure 1.3) would be described by contemporaries as major sources of wealth for their owners (Munter 1967: 66). When consortia business shares were put on the market, successful titles often fetched high sums. A share in the Edinburgh Evening

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Figure 1.3  George Faulkner’s Dublin Journal, 10–14 March 1740 (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin)

Courant reputedly sold for £36 in 1744–45; by 1783 the newspaper’s value had soared to the point that it cost the entrepreneurial printer David Ramsay £1300 to buy half-­ownership of the paper from Robert Fleming (Brown 2012: 359). John Mennons, founder of the Glasgow Advertiser in 1783 (which would be retitled the Glasgow Herald in 1805), would become a wealthy landowner on the back of its success, selling a two-­thirds share in the paper for £900 in 1802 to Benjamin Mathie, a clerk to the Glasgow Trades House (leaving the other third

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in the hands of his son Thomas Mennons) (Brown 2012: 359; Cowan 1946: 21). The implementation of the Libel Act of 1792 loosened press restrictions, and in light of opportunities for income generation noted above, new publications began to appear with greater frequency in the last two decades of the century. Ivon Asquith notes in this respect, ‘In 1780 there were only three important kinds of newspapers: the London morning dailies, the evening papers published two or three times a week, and the provincial weeklies. The last two decades of the eighteenth-­century saw the rapid growth of two new types: Sunday and daily evening papers’ (Asquith 1978: 99). Sunday newspapers began to circulate from around 1779, adding to the range of titles on offer to the discerning reader. The first known example to appear in London was E. Johnson’s British Gazette and Sunday Monitor, later to shorten its title to Sunday Monitor. In appearance and content it was no different to daily papers, though it set aside a column on the first page specifically for religious instruction (Black 1987: 251). Other London-­based launches in the 1780s and 1790s included Ayre’s Sunday London Gazette, the London Recorder, the Observer (the world’s oldest surviving Sunday newspaper), Bell’s Weekly Messenger and the Weekly Register. The latter, issued by John Bell in 1796, would feature a prototype format picked up in other Sunday periodicals, that of a socially inclusive paper focused less on religion and offering instead a miscellany of news and entertainment aimed at a wide readership that specifically included women readers. In Dublin the Oracle or Sunday Gazette was launched in 1796, but it was short-­lived, folding a year later (see Figure 1.4). As Martin Conboy notes, once established, Sunday papers proved remarkably successful by emphasising that ‘working people could expect entertainment from their periodical reading, not simply political and didactical instruction’ (Conboy 2004: 154). The first evening papers had been introduced in London in the first decade of the eighteenth century, and by 1720 they counted three important publications: the Evening Post (1709), the St James’s Evening Post (1715) and the Whitehall Evening Post (1718). 1718 also marked the founding of Scotland’s first evening paper, the Edinburgh Evening Courant. The advantage of evening over morning publication was that later editions were not only able to copy news from their morning rivals, but also include the most up-­to-­date news from the foreign mails that had arrived during the day. Although morning papers tried to combat this difficulty by placing the most recent news on the first and last pages, which were printed last, the evening press

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Figure 1.4  The Oracle or Sunday Gazette (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin)

undoubtedly cut into the sales of their morning counterparts. As early as 1717, John Toland noted that, whereas before People us’d to send all or most of the four [morning] papers aforesaid to their friends and correspondents in the country every post-­night, now the sale of them is almost confin’d to this town. Nay the event of them is even much lessen’d here, many persons contenting themselves to read over the same

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business of the press 49 evening posts, which they send to their friends at night. (quoted in Harris 1987: 34) Of the three London evening papers noted above, only one survived until the end of the century, the Whitehall Evening Post (founded by Daniel Defoe). Other important English titles in the late 1700s included the St James’s Chronicle and the Gazetteer. The evening press proved profitable enterprises in general, however, and the last decades saw not only their consolidation but further start-­ups including the Dublin Evening Post (1778), the Sun (1792), and the first daily evening paper, the Star (1788). In the face of this gold rush of newspaper launches, William Pitt sought to dampen appetites through the 1798 Newspaper Act, which restricted how newspapers could be conducted, required registration of printers, owners and publishers, and imposed penalties for exporting papers to enemy territories and copying from foreign sources items deemed to be malicious or libellous against the king and constitutional government. It presaged a further barrage of punitive taxation (the so-­called ‘taxes on knowledge’) that sought to control and rein in cheap newspaper and periodical press production through to the mid-­ nineteenth century.

Conclusion As can be seen, the economics of the British and Irish press over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries shifted in nature and focus, moving from newspapers produced as business adjuncts for bookselling and publishing interests, to politically subsidised vehicles, and then into editorial and financial independence via strategic use of external advertising and income sources. The period was marked by repeated attempts by governing forces to control and at times suppress the development of newspapers and journals as independent information sources. This was done via overt means in the form of stringent taxes, legal restrictions and censorship measures, and covert means, such as funding papers directly or offering secret subsidies to writers and proprietors to manipulate and direct news coverage in ways advantageous to government interests. As the eighteenth century progressed, newspapers began to draw on advertising from local merchants and business interests for financial sustainability. This enabled them to escape government financial control, as well as reshape press outputs to address local information needs. Advertising as part of newspaper management changed

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business practices and enabled newspaper production to move from part-­time side efforts of printers and stationers to highly organised enterprises requiring expanded complements of skilled staff able to cover a range of newly developing activities (such as financial management, distribution, editorial and production tasks). By the end of the century, press structures were stable in ways that enabled businesses to take major advantage of technological and industrial changes that were ushered in by the early nineteenth century.

Case Study 1: The Times David Finkelstein The Times began life under a different name and with a different remit to its later self. Launched in 1785 by John Walter under the title of the Daily Universal Register, it was initially a four-­page daily broadsheet priced at 2½ pence, begun as a means of promoting a system of typography favoured by Walter, and using news as the hook to demonstrate its potential. Walter had been a fairly successful businessman who had made a great deal of money initially as a coal merchant. He moved into insurance as an underwriter at Lloyd’s in 1781, but a combination of losses incurred from American, French and Jamaican incidents forced him into bankruptcy in 1782. He began a new career as printer and publisher, investing in a patent for a typographical process that used ‘logotypes’, or founts composed of complete words instead of letters, as a means of speeding up typesetting work (with mixed success). The Logographic Press would launch in 1784 using the new system for printing various books and pamphlets, and the Daily Universal Register began life as an adjunct example of the press’s activities. The opening editorial of the Register announced its purpose in wide terms, suggesting that the newspaper: ought to be the Register of the times and faithful recorder of every species of intelligence; it ought not to be engrossed by any particular object; but like a well-­covered table, it should contain something suited to every palate; observations on the dispositions of our own and of foreign Courts should be provided for the political reader; debates should be reported for the amusement or information of those who may be particularly fond of them; and a due attention should be paid to the interests of trade, which are so greatly promoted by advertisements. (Anon. 1935: 26) Walter also claimed the Universal Register would focus on ways to ‘facilitate the commercial intercourse between the different parts of the community

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case study 1 : the times 51 through the channel of advertisements; to record occurrences and to abridge parliamentary debates’ (Anon. 1935: 27). It did so fairly discreetly, but not to an extent that it made much profit initially. The journal was relaunched on 1 January 1788, retitled the Times or Daily University Register, with a new editor at the helm, a realignment to include commercial news, topical and local information, and the discreet removal from its pages of gossip and most (but not all) critical notices of government figures and policies. The Register portion of the name would be quietly dropped soon after. Underpinning this remodelling was a secret agreement with the Treasury, which from 1789 to 1799 provided the paper with an annual subsidy of £300 ‘as compensation for its championship of Ministerial policy and its opposition to the party of the Prince of Wales’ (Anon. 1935: 213). John Walter would comment that three hundred pounds a year ‘as a reward for the politics of the Paper’ seemed a good deal for a newly emerging paper run initially as a small part of his publishing and bookselling business (Anon. 1935: 213). By 1792 the bookselling side of the business was languishing, while the paper was beginning to flourish financially, with daily sales of around 3,000, rising to 4,000 in 1793 (Anon. 1935: 35). Despite its acceptance of a subsidy, the paper would find itself in difficulties with the government authorities for its reporting and commentary. Walter was not against making political points when pushed. An initial mild skirmish occurred in 1786, when Walter was fined £50 for a libellous statement made against Lord Loughborough. Worse was to come in February 1789, when Walter printed articles by the joint secretary to the Treasury, Thomas Steele, accusing the royal dukes ‘of insincerity in celebrating the king’s recovery from illness and of conducting an opposition party’ (Barker 2004). Steele’s articles were declared libellous, and Walter was held accountable for publishing them, with a subsequent sentence in November 1789 of a £50 fine and a year’s imprisonment in Newgate prison. Another year of imprisonment was added to the sentence following further prosecutions for libellous articles against the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Clarence. After a concerted campaign by friends and family, and petitions to the Prince of Wales, Walter was released in March 1791 and offered compensation of £250 by the Treasury for his troubles. Government subsidies were abruptly terminated in 1799 after a further incident in which Walter published a paragraph criticising the administration, and he was then convicted of further libel against Lord Cowper. By this stage, Walter’s younger son John Walter II was beginning to involve himself in running the paper, maintaining its financial security and political independence through expanding its advertising and subscription base, and reorienting its position to remain independent of government control. He would succeed officially to full control of the paper in 1803 on his father’s retirement.

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Begun as a bookselling adjunct, subsidised secretly by the government to strategically shape its content and political orientation, then freed of political finance and constraints through the tactical expansion of advertising income, by the beginning of the nineteenth century The Times was not only a respected publication, but most importantly, from the proprietor’s point of view, a highly profitable one. The paper’s early history, moving from business adjunct to political tool and then editorial independence, thus neatly mirrors the historical trajectory of British newspaper expansion across the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Chapter Two

PRODUCTION AND DISTRIBUTION Helen S. Williams

Introduction From the mid-­seventeenth century until 1800, print production of all kinds increased in scale and improved in quality, although the technologies in use remained fundamentally the same throughout the period, particularly as regards the production of text. In addition, the methods and technologies of newspaper production were identical to those of other sectors of letterpress ­printing – ­the same materials, machines and, usually, personnel were used for the production of newspapers, books and the small commercial ‘jobs’ that kept the presses busy in the absence of larger-­scale works. Restrictions were maintained by the various jurisdictions across the British Isles, all of which were aimed at controlling both the number of printing offices and apprentice numbers in them. However, working practices and printing-­office culture were similar throughout Britain. Although the technologies of text-­based print production changed little between the mid-­seventeenth century and the start of the nineteenth century, the quality of printing did improve, driven by developments in the production of books. However, as the printing of newspapers and periodicals was done on the same equipment by the same workers, the two sectors were intimately connected. The quality of the type in use improved: restrictions on type production lapsed along with those on printing, leading to the establishment of more type foundries. The scale of the paper-­making industry, and to a lesser extent that of ink manufacture, also expanded in order to supply the needs of the print trade. This chapter covers the technologies of printing including the development of the supply trades (type, paper and ink) and the distribution 53

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of print. It will also consider the organisation of work in the print shop and the early growth of trade associations throughout the British Isles, particularly among operative printers. These organisations included the ‘chapel’ which governed the work in the print shop, and wider groups, known as typographical societies, established as welfare organisations in a number of printing centres by 1800. They also undertook the function of collective bargaining with employers over wages on an ad hoc basis.

Printing Presses In 1640 letterpress printing offices were substantially the same as those that had been in use since the fifteenth century. However, by the 1790s many of the changes that were to come over the next hundred years or so were either in development or had been foreshadowed. The pace of innovation in this period was slow, and there were few important technical innovations that influenced the printing trade as a whole. The most noticeable changes were an improvement in the quality of the printed product, especially as regards books, which were at least partly the result of refinements in the design and founding of type, and a better supply of good-­quality paper. Newspaper and periodical production also benefited from these changes, but speed and timeliness of production always took priority over quality. Until the early years of the nineteenth century the structural material of letterpress printing presses was mainly wood, apart from the screw, which was made of metal. The first iron press was not invented until 1798, by Earl Stanhope. Press making had become a specialised business by the mid-­seventeenth century, given that ‘printers’ joiners’ were included in the list of related businesses in the first guide to the printing trade, Mechanick Exercises; or The Doctrine of Handyworks applied to the Art of Printing, published by Joseph Moxon in 1683 (Moxon 1958: 12). However, it seems likely that this would have been limited to major printing centres and, as Feather (1985: 99) comments, it would have been possible for ‘any competent carpenter’ to build a press, which might well have been what occurred in the provinces in places where there was no specialist joiner. The press, described in exhaustive detail by Moxon, is what he terms the ‘New-­ fashion’d Press’, an improved version that was in general use in the Low Countries. Moxon, however, claims that most printing offices in England in his day were using ‘Old-­fashion’d Presses’, but that he ‘would for Publick benefit introduce it’ (Moxon 1958: 45). Thirty years later, James Watson made a similar observation on the presses in use

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Figure 2.1  Wooden printing press, from T. C. Hansard, Typographia, London: Baldwin, Cradock and Joy, 1825 (Reproduced by permission of the Edward Clark Collection, Edinburgh Napier University)

in Edinburgh, where the Scottish printing industry was concentrated, listing presses of the ‘Old English Fashion’ as one of the causes of the poor-­quality printing that dominated in Scotland, and also asserting that ‘One new fashion’d Dutch Press is worth half a Score of such’ (Watson [1713] 1963: 20). Although larger wooden presses were apparently made, the average size of the platen of those which have survived is approximately 18 by 12 inches. To print a sheet larger than the size of the platen, the printing surface or ‘forme’ required two pulls of the bar, with the bed of the press, which contained the forme, being moved between impressions. It was not possible to increase the size of the platen significantly, as there were limits to the force the wooden frame could withstand when the pressmen pulled the bar to force the platen down on to the forme (Moran 1978: 30). Early newspapers consisted of a single sheet printed on both sides, and folded to form four pages: each side required two pulls by the pressmen, and the sheets had to be dried in between. Output depended not only on the skill, but also on the strength and stamina of the

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pressmen, and thus the speed at which they might work, as well as on the size of the printed sheet. In the case of newspapers and other periodicals, this varied during the period, depending at least in part on the rules imposed by the various Stamp Acts. Pressmen worked in pairs, alternating roles as the ‘puller’ who operated the press, and the beater who applied the ink to the printing surface. It is generally thought that the rate of operation was between 200 and 250 impressions per hour, to produce a sheet printed on one side, which would then have to be dried and returned to the press to have the second side printed. Finished newspapers, consisting of perfected sheets, that is those printed on both sides, could therefore only be produced at a maximum rate of 100–125 sheets per hour. The pressmen’s skill not only lay in the process of printing a good impression from the forme of type, but in what is known as the make-­ready. The techniques were developed by experience, and involved damping the paper and taking a trial pull at the press, to establish where the printing surface was uneven. The height of the pieces of type, or woodcut, that were printed too light would then be adjusted using pieces of paper. As type was cast by hand, and there might be minute differences between nearly every piece, this process of ‘making ready’1 could be time-­consuming, particularly for pressmen using old or second-­hand presses and worn type (Moran 1978: 34). James Watson was of the opinion that another cause of ‘decay’ in the quality of printing was the expectation that pressmen would work for up to eighteen hours a day for poor wages, and he again contrasts this with practices in use among Dutch printers. He in fact believed that the quality of the finished product was dependent on the skill of the pressmen (Watson [1713] 1963: 18–20). The ‘basic equipment of the printer’ in the pre-­industrial period remained the same, and was common to printers throughout the British Isles: a press and, particularly, the type represented the largest investment (Feather 1985: 98). A survey of twenty-­nine printing houses in London, undertaken in the 1660s, when the print trade was still tightly controlled in England, showed that the largest printing business in the city, that of the King’s Printer, had six presses. Of the others, two had five presses, one had four, and five had three (McKenzie 2002b: 794). John White, a printer in York, had three printing presses, valued at a total of £15 at his death in 1716: twenty-­one founts of type were valued at £105. John White’s widow, Grace, inherited the business and established York’s first newspaper, the York Mercury, 1

‘Making ready’ included all the adjustments made by the pressmen in order to ensure that a correct register and a clear and even impression was taken.

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production and distribution 57 two years later (Cranfield 1962: 242–3; Sessions and Sessions 1976: 29). In the 1720s a second-­hand press was bought by the Cambridge University Press for £11 11s 0d, though a new press would have been more expensive (Feather 1985: 100). By the early years of the nineteenth century, a new ‘Common-­size Printing Press’ cost £31 10s 0d (Stower 1808: 514–17). While the smallest printing offices might only have a single press, those producing newspapers, including the provincial weeklies, would have had at least two. In Birmingham in the final years of the eighteenth century, Miles Swinney, printer of the Birmingham Chronicle, operated four presses, and the printer of the rival title, Aris’s Birmingham Gazette, T. A. Pearson, had five (Feather 1985: 99–100). A market in second-­ hand printing equipment developed as the printing industry expanded: presses and type were sometimes advertised for sale in the newspapers which had been produced using them. An advertisement for the sale of an Edinburgh printing business in 1765 lists the different sizes of type, and also announces that There will also be sold, at the same time, TWO PRINTING PRESSES, with their necessary apparatus, both in good condition; about one hundred pairs of CASES, sixty-­three of which are oak, in excellent condition. (Caledonian Mercury, 23 December 1876, 3) The contents of the type cases had been supplied by the foundries of ‘Mr Caslon of London’, ‘Mr Bain of Edinburgh’ and ‘Dr Wilson of Glasgow’. Following the death of William Halhead, all his ‘STOCK in TRADE and MATERIALS’ were advertised for sale in the Cumberland Pacquet and Ware’s Whitehaven Advertiser (9 October 1789, 3): ‘A very eligible and advantageous Opportunity is here offered to any Person inclinable to succeed the Deceased in the above Business, which was carried on by him, for several Years, with great Reputation.’ The printer of the Chester Chronicle, John Fletcher, decided to ‘decline business’ in 1795, and offered ‘the printing materials and property’ for sale in his own newspaper, without giving much detail: ‘the stock of types and printing materials, which are chiefly new, is very large, and of the most modern and improved make’ (Chester Chronicle, 4 September 1795, 3). It is not easy to be sure of the actual costs of running a printing office, for, as Cranfield (1962: 168) notes, ‘the business organisation of an eighteenth century printing house was rudimentary’. Apart from the costs of the presses and the type, paper was a significant element in the costs of print production, as it is today. The other cost was the wages

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of the compositors and pressmen, but very little information about the sums paid is available until late in the eighteenth century. However, it is known that by 1800 the piece-­work system dominated: compositors were paid by the thousand ‘ens’2 with the rate varying according to the size of the fount: smaller sizes were paid at a higher rate. Pressmen were often also paid by a similar system, in their case based on the number of sheets printed, known as a ‘token’ (Moxon 1958: 292). ‘Establishment wages’, paid weekly rather than by the piece, were also earned by some journeymen, but it is difficult to be sure at what point piece rates became the most common standard for pay, though they had done so by 1800. As far as actual wages are concerned, some scattered information is available: Thomas Gent was paid 20 shillings a week as a journeyman in London in 1719 (Gent 1832: 90), and forty years later Horace Walpole paid a guinea (21 shillings) a week to his pressmen (Howe 1947: 80). Advertisements for journeymen began to appear in the newspapers themselves in the later eighteenth century, but do not give an indication of the pay rates to be expected: the Norfolk Chronicle advertised for ‘a GOOD COMPOSITOR. It is hoped none will apply whose Abilities and Assiduity may not be relied on, as he will have constant Employ’ (18 March 1786, 2). Sobriety is more often mentioned: M. Angus advertised in the Newcastle Courant for ‘a JOURNEYMAN COMPOSITOR and a PRESSMAN.– Sober men will meet with suitable encouragement’ (4 February 1786); and the Sheffield Register, Yorkshire, Derbyshire, & Nottinghamshire Universal Advertiser carried an advertisement for ‘A COMPOSITOR, who is Master of hi[s] Business, and an experienced P ­ RESSMAN – s­teady, sober m ­ en – ­may, on immediate application, meet with a permanent Situation, in Gale’s Printing-Office, Sheffield’ (13 July 1792, 3). The Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette carried an advertisement for the Clarendon Printing Office in Oxford, requesting ‘two or three sober industrious ­COMPOSITORS . . . ­The employment will be constant, and the work advantageous’ (26 March 1789, 3). However, it is clear from the records of the trade organisations that by 1800 a proportion of the journeymen printers were paid by the piece (Howe 1947). By the end of the eighteenth century the growth in demand for news had begun to drive innovations in daily newspaper production, enabling faster production of larger papers, but the main developments did not affect the production of weekly newspapers and other periodicals until later in the nineteenth century. Towards the end of the 2

The letter ‘en’ was used as a standard measure, and 1,000 ens was a notional hour’s work.

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production and distribution 59 eighteenth century, many of the changes that would have a dramatic effect on the production of newspapers and periodicals were under development. Stereotyping, which would become a standard printing office practice, allowing the reproduction of multiple copies of a single flat printing surface, was originally invented by Edinburgh goldsmith William Ged in 1725, and rejected by the printing trade. It began to come into use for book printing once patented by Alexander Tilloch and Andrew Foulis of Glasgow in 1784, and was further developed by Earl Stanhope, using a plaster-­of-­Paris mould around 1800 (Hansard 1825: 815). Although it made a significant contribution to developments in speeding up newspaper printing in the nineteenth century, this application of the technology does not seem to have occurred to its promoters in the final years of the eighteenth century, despite the increasing demand for news at the time. Another invention of Earl Stanhope’s around the same time was the iron press, which allowed the printing of larger sheets, but it was no faster in operation than the wooden presses on which it was based. Most newspapers and periodicals were almost exclusively composed of text, but there were some limited illustrations, including capital letters, and small blocks to illustrate advertisements and other announcements. These included figures of horses in announcements of race meetings, ships (for listings of sailings or arrivals) and other small ‘stock blocks’ to illustrate advertisements, for example cattle for sale. Plans showing battlefields and, occasionally, larger portraits or pictures of major events might be included (Cranfield 1962: 269). These images were usually woodcuts which could be printed at the same time as set type. The area which was not to be printed was removed from a block of wood which had been cut to type height, leaving the area to be printed in relief. From the 1770s Thomas Bewick developed the technique of engraving on wood: the image was again left in relief and could be printed alongside letterpress text, but it was carved using engraver’s tools into the end grain of a hard wood block, instead of the traditional technique of woodcuts, which were carved into the ‘plank grain’ of soft wood. This technique became the dominant form of illustration in newspapers and illustrated periodicals in the nineteenth century. Although they could not be included in newspapers, copperplate engravings were used to illustrate monthly and annual periodicals. These illustrations could not be printed alongside letterpress text, because engravings are printed by an intaglio process, with the ink held in the grooves in a copper plate, either incised with tools by the engraver or etched into the plate with acid. When the plate was ready

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for printing, it was inked, and the surplus wiped away. According to Hansard (1825: 803) achieving this ‘without taking too much ink out of the strokes cut by the graver, consists the practical proficiency of the workman in his art’. Once ready for printing, the plate was placed in the press, known as a rolling press, with the moistened paper on top and it was then covered with two or three layers of flannel, before being rolled between two cylinders to produce the impression. A patent was granted to William Nicholson in 1790 (Moran 1978: 101) for a letterpress printing machine that used an impression cylinder rather than a platen, thereby speeding up production, but it was not used in practice. The first successful application of the cylinder principle to letterpress printing was the machine built for the book publisher Thomas Bensley in 1812 by Frederich Koenig and Walter Bauer. Two years later a larger machine was built for John Walter at The Times.

Type The general improvement in the quality of the type in use in Britain especially during the eighteenth century had some influence on the appearance of newspapers, but was driven by the demand for finely printed books. In the first manual of printing published in Britain, Joseph Moxon states, in the preface to the section on ‘letter-­cutting’, that the technique has been ‘hitherto so conceal’d among the Artificers of it, that I cannot learn any one hath taught it any other’ (Moxon 1958: 87). At this time, the restrictions on the number of type foundries that were permitted had returned to those imposed by the Star Chamber decrees of 11 July 1637, which limited the master founders to four named individuals. Each master was only allowed to have two apprentices at any one time, and ‘all journey-­men founders be employed by masters of the trade, and idle journeymen be compelled to work upon pain of imprisonment, and such other punishment as the Court shall think fit’ (cited in Hansard 1825: 228). As well as restrictions on the manufacture of type, requests to import type from foundries in Europe had to be authorised in England by the Company of Stationers. When these restrictions were lifted with the expiry of the Licensing Act in 1695, more type foundries were established from the early years of the eighteenth century. One of the most important was that of William Caslon. Caslon originally trained as an engraver, before transferring his skills to type founding and establishing a foundry in London in the 1720s, which ‘rapidly advanced in fame and excellence’ (Reed 1952: 233). According to Hansard (1825: 350), ‘From 1720 to 1780 few works were printed with the types of any

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production and distribution 61 other foundry.’ The foundry, under various names, remained in family hands until the 1870s. Caslon’s apprentices included Joseph Jackson and Thomas Cotterell, who set up their own foundry after being ‘discharged’ as the ringleaders in a dispute with their employer over pay. Vincent Figgins worked for Jackson between 1782 and 1792, initially as an apprentice and later as journeyman. Outside London, another important influence on type designs was John Baskerville in Birmingham, who printed books set with type he had designed from the later 1750s. He does not appear to have supplied type to other printers, so his reputation rests not only on the books printed on his own press, but also on the influence they had on other type founders, for example Alexander Wilson in Scotland (Pardoe 1975: 166) and Miles or Myles Swinney, who printed the Birmingham Chronicle from 1771. Baskerville’s foundry was dispersed on his death in 1775, and Swinney appears to have established his own soon after, known as the Phoenix Foundry. At least one of his workmen had been a punch-­cutter for Baskerville, and the type shows Baskerville’s influence. Swinney ‘is styled Letter-­Founder, Bookseller and Printer in the Directories of 1785’ (Reed 1952: 345). Hansard (1825: 355) regarded Baskerville as ‘eccentric’ and his type as ‘new and fanciful’, though he also noted that ‘although they had not the good fortune to obtain the approbation of the printers, [they] possessed considerable merit’. According to one study, Baskerville ‘passed into oblivion for more than a century’ until his types were revived by Stephenson, Blake & Co. from 1909. Ultimately, Baskerville’s greatest influence on newspapers might have occurred in the twentieth century when, in 1931, a version of his type was designed for the English Linotype company, whose machines were used mainly in newspaper production (Pardoe 1975: 166–7). There was also a type foundry in Bristol. The original name of the company was Fry & Pine: Joseph Fry (originally a medical doctor) and William Pine, the first printer of the Bristol Gazette, established the foundry alongside the printing office in Wine Street in 1764 together with Isaac Moore, a metalworker. The firm’s name changed to J. Fry & Co. in 1776, and Joseph’s sons Edmund and Henry were admitted to partnership in 1782 (Reed 1952: 298–9, 301). Joseph died in 1787, and the company became Edmund Fry & Co. Fry types were heavily influenced by both Caslon and Baskerville, and the company was also said to have done ‘considerable business in the American colonies’ towards the end of the century (Reed 1952: 304). The first foundry in Scotland was established in 1742 in St Andrews by Alexander Wilson, with his partner John Bain or Baine. The

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majority of printers in Scotland were in either Glasgow or Edinburgh, and after two years the foundry moved to Camlachie, just outside Glasgow, in order to be closer to their market, which now included the ‘prospect of extending their sales to Ireland and North America’ (Hansard 1825: 365). In 1747 John Bain moved to Dublin in order to set up what appears to have been one of the earliest type foundries in Ireland (Reed 1952: 265). The partnership was dissolved two years later, with the Dublin foundry becoming an independent concern taking over the Irish business. The earlier Irish printers had imported their type from English, Scottish and Dutch foundries (Kinane 2002: 19). Alexander Wilson remained in Scotland, working closely with the Foulis Press in Glasgow (Hansard 1825: 365). Another of Caslon’s apprentices, Henry Johnson, later became a printer, and his experience of printing lottery tickets in the 1770s led him to invent a system of linked types, in this case numbers, to speed up the process and also, he claimed, improve accuracy. He wanted to develop this to print text, and by the 1780s Johnson was seeking financial support for further work. He became involved with John Walter, who was not a printer but had been a coal merchant, and was also involved in insurance for some years. The business arrangements between Johnson and Walter are unclear, but they apparently fell out quite quickly, leaving Walter in charge of further development of the ‘logographic’ system, as it was now called (Feather 1977: 92–5). In 1784 he took over the premises previously occupied by the King’s Printers in Printing House Square, in London’s Blackfriars, which had stood empty for fifteen years, and established the Logographic Press. Caslon had supplied type to Johnson, which then had to be fixed together into syllables. However, Walter met with more opposition from type founders and so established his own foundry to exploit the ‘logographic’ process’ (Reed 1952: 343). The journeymen working for him were also unhappy, because he was taking on apprentices despite not being a time-­served printer himself, and was not paying what they regarded as the appropriate rate of wages (Feather 1977: 98). The original purpose of the business was to print books, but Walter, partly as a vehicle to advertise his wares, established the Daily Universal Register which first appeared on 1 January 1785, ‘printed at the Logographic Press’. Three years later the newspaper’s title was changed to The Times. The logographic system was intended to speed up the process of typesetting and the even more time-­consuming process of redistributing it for reuse, but it was cumbersome in use, and it is not clear how long it was retained for newspaper production. By the mid-­1790s it was no longer in use for any printing in the business

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production and distribution 63 (Feather 1977: 101). Experiments with the mechanisation of typesetting would continue for another hundred years, until the hot metal systems of Linotype and Monotype finally solved the problem of distributing type for reuse by casting fresh type for each use, and afterwards melting it down for reuse.

Ink Early printers made their own ink. In the opinion of C. H. Bloy, ‘the discovery of an oil-­based printing ink by Gutenberg was just as important as his development of the use of moveable metal type and the press’, and he also suggests that this was a development of the oil-­based paints in use at the time (Bloy 1967: 1–3). The main ingredients in printing ink were oil (which in Britain was usually linseed oil), a rosin produced by heating turpentine, and lamp-­black or soot. The rosin increased the viscosity of the ink, preventing it from spreading into the paper and aiding the drying, though also making it difficult to clean the type after use. The quality of these ingredients, and the care taken in the process of ink production itself, determined the quality of the ink used. Printers continued to make their own ink until the nineteenth century, though this could be a lengthy and dangerous process, and because of the risk of fire it was generally done away from the printing office itself. Ink was applied to the printing surface with ink balls made of circular pieces of sheepskin, stuffed with wool or hair, and attached to a wooden handle. The ink was cut from a solid block and spread on to the block using an ink slice. An ink ball was held in each hand and rolled across the ink, then applied to the printing surface. This was called ‘beating the forme’ (Bloy 1967: 53). This technique remained standard throughout the period. Seventeenth-­century inks were generally poor in quality, and the efforts of printers such as John Baskerville in Birmingham and the Foulis brothers in Glasgow to improve the quality of printing involved not only close attention to the type and paper used, but also to the quality of the inks. However, the improvements they pioneered did not always reach the smaller provincial printing offices where the output was dominated by jobbing and weekly newspaper production. Recipes for ink making for the use of these smaller offices have survived in contemporary printers’ manuals. There is, however, evidence of a separate ink-­making trade from the mid-­seventeenth century, first in a list of trades compiled by John Evelyn in 1660 (Bloy 1967: 66). The existence of these businesses was confirmed by Joseph Moxon twenty or so years later, when he included ink-­makers in his list of suppliers to the

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printing trade (Moxon 1958: 12), although from his description of their products, he found them unsatisfactory: the process of making Inck being as well laborious to the Body, as noysom and ungrateful to the Sence, and by several odd accidents dangerous of Firing the Place it is made in, Our English Master-Printers do generally discharge themselves of that trouble; and instead of having good Inck, content themselves that they pay an Inck-maker for good Inck, which may yet be better or worse according to the Conscience of the Inck-maker. (Moxon 1958: 82) Hansard (1825: 722–4) describes the ink-­making process at some length, noting that: ‘Good ink requires the possession of a variety of qualities, some of which are at variance with each others’, although the quality of the varnish base and how finely ground ‘the black’ or soot was were the prime considerations. The ink ‘must have such an affinity with the paper, as to adhere firmly to the surface from the moment it receives the impression; but it must not possess such tenacity as to remain upon the face of the type’. John Baskerville’s recipe, which Hansard recommends, required the ‘finest and oldest linseed oil’ which had to be boiled until it ‘acquired a certain thickness’ which could only be achieved ‘by long practice, and requires particular skill and care’, not least because of the risk of fire, as noted by Moxon above, always a danger in a printing office. Hansard notes that ‘One of the most tremendous fires that happened in this metropolis a few years since was thus occasioned.’ Ink-­making businesses seem to have been small concerns, and little is known about them, though it seems likely that they were concentrated in London. Cambridge University Press was buying ink from a London maker at the beginning of the eighteenth century (Bloy 1967: 67). By the 1780s The London and Country Printers, Booksellers and Stationers Vade Mecum listed three companies supplying ink, all of which were based in London: Blackwell’s, in Wood’s Close, St John’s Street; Stuart & Co., ‘Makers of Excellent Printing Ink’, which was sold by another company in Ludgate Hill; and Smith, ‘Printing Ink-­maker, and Manufacturer of Ink for marking Linen’ at Windmill Hill, Upper Moorside, whose product was used to print the directory (Pendred 1955: 5–6). William Blackwell established his company making printing ink in 1754 in Clerkenwell, and is known to have supplied ink to William Caslon for the printing of a type specimen in the 1760s. Blackwell’s were also suppliers to the Daily Universal Register, later The Times, when it began publication. Hansard (1825: 715) stated

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production and distribution 65 that Blackwell was the first ink-­maker of any note and according to Caleb Stower, writing in the early years of the nineteenth century: ‘Mr. Blackwell has, unquestionably, for many years produced better fine as well as common ink than any of his competitors; but an improvement is still wanting, as to colour, in the common ink’ (Stower 1808: 512). In 1800 Blackwell’s were charging 30–36 shillings per dozen pounds of ink for bookwork, and 18–20 shillings per dozen for newspaper ink, possibly an indication of the difference in quality. Ink for ‘posters and jobs’ was a mere 15 shillings per dozen pounds (Bloy 1967: 67–8). The company survived into the twentieth century. By the end of the eighteenth century printing ink makers had appeared in places other than London. Thomas Martin, nephew of John Baskerville’s foreman Robert Martin, set up his business in Birmingham: ‘His early knowledge of the trade, gathered from his uncle, gave him an advantage which none of his competitors possessed, and he soon produced an ink of a very superior colour’ (Hansard 1825: 720). Martin had a London agent for his products, T. Bishop of 10 Fisher Street, Red Lion Square (Hansard 1825: 733). Alexander Kincaid, ‘Stationer and Printers Ink maker, Red and Black’, occupied premises just off the Canongate in Edinburgh (Williamson’s Edinburgh Directory, 1790, 55).

Paper Papermaking was well established elsewhere in Europe long before the first paper mills appeared in Britain, and much of the paper for printing was imported until the nineteenth century. Although the first paper mill in England was founded before the end of the fifteenth century, the industry does not seem to have been established on a sound footing until the second half of the sixteenth century. English papermaking was at that time largely concentrated within reach of London, reflecting the importance of the capital as the main centre of business and government, as well as of the print trade. In the mid-­seventeenth century there seem to have been around forty paper mills in England (Kurlansky 2016: 184). In Scotland, the first paper mill was established on the Water of Leith at Dalry, just outside Edinburgh, in 1590. A hundred years later, ‘paper-­making in Scotland can not be said to have been a large industry, comprising at the most some six or possible nine vats. The output of these might have been as much as 150–200 reams in a week’ (Thomson 1974: 24). Paper mills were dependent on water power, and their operation might be interrupted by drought or flooding, as well as shortage of

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raw materials or mechanical failure, meaning that the estimated figure for the annual output from a single vat of ‘6–8 reams in 10 hours’, suggested in the 1830 edition of the Edinburgh Encyclopaedia, was unlikely to be achieved (Thomson 1974: 24). By the early eighteenth century at least twelve mills had been established in Scotland, though not all of them survived. They were also concentrated in the main centre of law and government, on rivers on the outskirts of Edinburgh, although mills had also been established near Glasgow and Aberdeen, the other main centres of print production at the time. The industry in England by this stage was on a fairly large scale, with around two hundred mills recorded (Thomson 1974: 4–9). There was no significant papermaking industry in Ireland for most of the period, and printers there imported their paper from mills elsewhere in Britain, as well as from Italy, Holland and France (Kinane 2002: 19). Despite the scale of paper production in the British Isles, approximately 40 per cent of the paper required was imported, including most of the higher-­ quality papers used for writing and printing. Papermaking was a skilled occupation, and it was said to be the lack of trained labour that was at the back of the reliance on imports for the higher-­quality papers, although a shortage of higher-­quality rags may also have been a factor. Skilled papermakers among the Protestant refugees, or Huguenots, who arrived from France in the 1680s contributed to an increase in the production of the higher-­quality papers, as well as business expertise (Kurlansky 2016: 185). The basic techniques of papermaking in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had changed little over the previous two hundred years, though production was mechanised at the end of the eighteenth century. As water was needed in large quantities to produce the paper, and also to flow through the waterwheels needed to power the machinery, paper mills were found on rivers, usually near centres of population, where there was a market for the product as well as a good supply of textile rags which were the raw material for paper. The best white paper, suitable for printing and writing, was made from linen rags, while poorer grades were made from coarser materials such as canvas and old ropes. Cotton rags were also used for printing, but gave a different appearance and texture, and cotton paper was mainly used for copperplate printing for illustrations, including those printed for insertion into books and annual periodicals (Kurlansky 2016: 187). Rags were obtained from a variety of sources, and were often in short supply. The cheapest were unsorted rags bought in bulk from local dealers, but this left the work of sorting to the paper mill. Rags

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production and distribution 67

Figure 2.2  Sorting rags in an eighteenth-century paper mill (Reproduced by permission of the Edward Clark Collection, Edinburgh Napier University)

sorted by the dealer were more expensive but more convenient, as the various fabrics were separated and buttons removed. Even if they had not been sorted, by the eighteenth century rags were classified for sale as ‘Superfine, Fine, Blue, Second and Grey’. In the 1790s prices for the different qualities of rags varied from 6 shillings down to 8 pence per stone.3 In 1756 the Edinburgh Society for Encouraging the Arts Sciences Manufactures and Agriculture offered a premium of two guineas to ‘the gatherer of the greatest quantity of superfine rags of muslin, cambrick lawn and finest ­linen . . . w ­ orth five shillings per stone and upwards’; other grades included ‘fine rags, comprehending linen, cotton, muslin, ­etc . . . ­worth from 3 shillings to 5 shillings per stone’ (cited in Thomson 1974: 33). For five years during the 1790s Edinburgh had a ‘General Rag Warehouse’, said to be ‘the 3

A stone (14 pounds avoirdupois) is equivalent to 6.35 kilograms.

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greatest concern of its kind ever carried on’ in the city. It was owned by papermakers, who wanted a guaranteed supply of their raw material (Thomson 1974: 34). Once the rags had been sorted and washed, they were left to soak in large vats until fermentation began. The colour of the paper produced was to some extent affected by the colour of the rags, and they might be left in the sun to be bleached. However, from the 1790s chlorine, which had been discovered in the 1770s, came into use, speeding up the process while also increasing the supply of white rags, and therefore of white paper. The piles of rotting rags were turned, and more water was added occasionally, and sometimes lime. Once the fibres had rotted sufficiently, the rags were washed again, then beaten to a pulp. Early papermakers used what amounted to a large mortar and pestle, but by the seventeenth century a stamping mill was used. This consisted of wooden hammers, driven by water power, which hammered the rags to a pulp against a block of wood or stone, under a steady flow of water which was drained through a sieve. A system of cylinders with steel blades was developed in Holland in the mid-­eighteenth century, replacing the wooden hammers. The fibre resulting from the stamping process, known as ‘stuff ’, was held in storage tanks, and transferred as

Figure 2.3  Beating rags in an eighteenth-century paper mill (Reproduced by permission of the Edward Clark Collection, Edinburgh Napier University)

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production and distribution 69 required to vats. These were heated by charcoal burners to maintain a steady temperature, and stirred occasionally to ensure that the fibres did not settle to the bottom of the vat. The paper sheets were formed by means of a mould, which took the form of a sieve, used together with a wooden frame known as the deckle. The size of the deckle dictated the size of the finished sheet. The vatman dipped the mould and deckle into the vat of stuff, and lifted it out and shook it as the water drained back into the vat, to ensure that the fibres settled evenly to form a sheet of the right thickness. The vatman then removed the deckle and passed the mould to the ‘coucher’, who deposited the wet sheet on to a piece of felt, building a stack, alternately paper and felt, until there were six quires (144 sheets) of paper. The stack was then put into a wooden screw press, and pressed to remove the water: this could take the strength of three men. After being separated from the felts, the paper still contained up to 70 per cent water, so the sheets were hung in a drying loft. Once dry they were dipped in resin, pressed and dried again before being rubbed to produce the required surface. This was originally a hand process, but by this period a water-­powered ‘glazing hammer’ was sometimes used.

Figure 2.4  Loft for drying paper (Reproduced by permission of the Edward Clark Collection, Edinburgh Napier University)

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The paper sheets would then be wrapped in reams of twenty quires each to be sold (Lyddon and Marshall 1975: 48–51). The demand for paper of a suitable quality for printing outstripped supply and, as in the case of the printing press on which it was to be used, the production of paper sheets was dependent on muscle power. At the very end of the eighteenth century Louis Robert invented a machine that made paper as a continuous sheet. The brothers Fourdrinier, who settled in England as refugees from the French Revolution, developed this in the early years of the nineteenth century into the method of production that has remained in use up to the present day.

The Organisation of the Trade From its first emergence in the fifteenth century, letterpress printing involved a group of workers, usually male, working together under the supervision of a master printer to set type and print the results. The numbers in each print shop varied, and at some periods were dictated by legislation, but the master printer was usually assisted by one or more journeymen, that is, men who had completed a seven-­ year apprenticeship. There would also be a number of apprentices, also at times limited by law, who conventionally lived on the premises, although this became less usual during the period. Paper mills and type foundries operated in a similar way. From the end of the Civil Wars of the mid-­seventeenth century, and even more clearly after the relaxation of the controls on numbers from the early eighteenth century, not only were more apprentices admitted to the trade, but journeymen printers were better able to set up as masters. Another feature of the spread of the printing industry was that journeymen were able to move between the growing number of print centres throughout Britain and Ireland in search of employment. A time-­served journeyman was able to work at either case (setting type) or press, and would be able to work in a print shop in any place where employment was to be found. By the mid-­seventeenth century collective organisations were already in existence in British print shops. In 1683 Joseph Moxon wrote that ‘Every Printing-­house is by the Custom of Time out of mind, called a Chappel; and all the Workmen that belong to it are Members of the Chappel: and the Oldest Freeman is Father of the Chappel’ (Moxon 1958: 323). Membership of the chapel was expected, along with the payment of dues and fines, which were often spent on drink. Resisting requests for payment was difficult, as Benjamin Franklin found when working as a compositor in the London print shop of John Watts in

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production and distribution 71 the 1720s. He had paid five shillings when he had started working in the press room, but when he transferred to the composing room a few weeks later at his employer’s request, a further five shillings ‘for drink’ was requested. Franklin considered this to be an ‘imposition’ and, with the master’s support, refused to pay: I stood out two or three weeks, was accordingly considered as an excommunicate, and had so many pieces of private mischief done me, by mixing my sorts, transposing my pages, breaking my matter, etc., etc., if I were ever so little out of the room, and all ascribed to the chappel ghost, which they said ever haunted those not regularly admitted, that, notwithstanding the master’s protection, I found myself oblig’d to comply and pay the money. (Franklin 1898: 64) The chapel rules varied between printing shops, but the substance was similar throughout Britain. Moxon describes a democratic organisation: ‘Controversies relating to the Chappel, or any of its Members, was a plurality of Votes in the Chappel. It being asserted as a Maxim, That the Chappel cannot Err’ (Moxon 1958: 323). The first four rules quoted by Moxon state that swearing, fighting, abusive language and lying, or being drunk would give rise to fines, known as ‘solaces’. This is not dissimilar to the rules applied in James Watson’s printing house in Edinburgh, dated 1721. The first rule prohibits ‘Cursing and Swearing, profane and abusive Speaking’, before banning ‘promiscuous drinking’, ‘Gaming, Fighting, Wrestling, Jostling, or Throwing any Thing at one another’ and ordering apprentices to give ‘due respect’ to the journeymen (Anon. [1721] 1988). Printing businesses in general remained on a small scale throughout the period, but with the removal of restrictions on the number of presses that could be operated by a master printer and the number of apprentices they might employ, larger workshops emerged, mainly in London. According to A. E. Musson, a survey of the printing industry in London in 1688 showed the King’s Printer with six, two printers with five, three with four, five with three, nine with two and six with only one. The King’s Printer employed eighteen workmen and the other large offices from seven to thirteen, but most had less than half a dozen, several only one or two, and two apparently one. (Musson 1949: 7) As the printing industry spread beyond established centres of London, Oxford, Cambridge, York, Edinburgh and Dublin in the eighteenth

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century, local associations of journeymen printers emerged in larger workshops. The progress from apprentice via a period as a journeyman to master printer was not universal, and by 1640 there was already a body of printers described by Musson as ‘lifelong journeymen’ whose interests frequently differed from those of the masters, especially the larger employers (Musson 1949: 10). Most printing offices set up in smaller market centres consisted of the master, a journeyman and ‘boy labour’ – possibly formally apprenticed, but not always. At the beginning of the period, apprentices were still expected to ‘live-­in’ with their master, but this convention gradually ceased and at least some apprentices were recruited from local families and continued to live at home. Printing was seen in a favourable light by parents looking for a profession for their sons: in 1765, according to Luke Hansard, his father objected to my being anything connected with the manufacturers of the City, whilst my mother on the other hand, would not consent to my being a common mechanick. – In this conflict of opinion the Weekly newspaper was resorted to, and an Apprentice to a Printer & Stationer being advertised for, the business delighted my parents amazingly. (Hansard 1991: 7) Apprentice numbers were a matter of perennial debate: there is some evidence that the early seventeenth-­century restrictions on apprentice numbers were evaded, leading to an over-­supply. Journeymen frequently requested restrictions on apprentice numbers:4 their pay was lower and towards the end of their training they could undertake most tasks, so were seen by some masters as cheap labour, allowing them to dispense with the services of time-­served journeymen. In 1787 a resolution was agreed by the journeymen compositors of London that, from 1 August that year, no apprentice bound ‘to learn the art and mystery of ­printing . . . ­whose indenture, contract of servitude, or real apprenticeship, shall appear to have been for a less term than seven years, be from such servitude entitled to follow, or exercise the said profession’ (cited in Howe 1947: 114). A pay dispute in 1793, which led to an increase in wages for the news compositors, also encouraged the employers to make more use of apprentice labour. The ultimate outcome was that it became a convention that lasted for over a hundred years that apprentices would not be employed in the London newspaper houses. This did not, however, have a significant effect on the intake, and in 1794 4

Apprentice numbers continued to be a part of the negotiations between employers and unions over pay and conditions until the end of the twentieth century.

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production and distribution 73 the first of several circulars ‘To Parents and Guardians’ was issued, to inform them of the scale of unemployment among time-­served compositors who had completed the seven-­year apprenticeship (Howe 1947: 115–17). These various negotiations and agreements are evidence of collective organisation among printers beyond that of the workplace chapel organisation. They, and others in the early nineteenth century, took place while the Combination Acts, which were aimed at preventing workmen from combining for this purpose, remained in force. The negotiations also provide evidence of printers’ pay rates in London: wages paid to provincial printers were probably lower. In November 1785 the London master printers met to agree prices, in response to a memorial presented to them by their journeymen in April. The fourth clause of this memorial referred specifically to ‘compositors employed on daily newspapers’, implying that there was already a difference between wage rates for book work and for those working exclusively in the newspaper trade. The news compositors seem to have been paid ‘establishment wages’ rather than piece rates, unlike compositors working in book and jobbing offices. The book compositors requested a rise from 4 pence to 4½ pence per 1,000 ‘ens’, which was agreed. The news compositors requested a rise of four shillings and sixpence in their wages, which at the time stood at one pound and seven shillings a week, but the masters thought it could not ‘be a matter of general regulation, as the trouble of every paper differs from that of another’ (Howe 1947: 73). This scale of prices seems to have stood in the London printing trade for at least five years. There were negotiations on some details in the 1790s, and again in 1800, at which point the journeymen compositors again addressed the masters, requesting a rate of 5½ pence per 1,000 ens (Howe 1947: 79). The pressmen made separate approaches at around the same time as the compositors: their pay rates were based on ‘tokens’.5 Their pay rates varied depending on the size of the sheet on the press, and also on the imposition, or number of pages printed on each sheet. In 1801 newspapers, which were printed folio, or with a single fold, were paid at a rate of between 4½ pence and 6½ pence per token (Howe 1947: 96).

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A token was 258 sheets (ten quires plus eighteen sheets), that is, 250 printed sheets, eight being allowed for sheets used in making ready and checking the register.

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The Spread and Distribution of Print The distribution of newspapers can be divided into two separate sectors. The demand for news was greatest in the governmental, legal and especially commercial centre of London, but from the perspective of the printer and proprietor, there was no especial need to arrange for a network of distributors. Newspapers could be bought from the printing office, as well as from public houses and coffee shops. Wealthy readers, or those in need of up-­to-­date information, might subscribe to the paper and have their copy delivered. Newspapers were sent out of London using the carriers and post coaches. The earliest newspapers outside London consisted entirely of advertisements and news drawn from the London papers, reset and reproduced exactly. It is also clear that the emerging postal system played a significant part in the distribution of news to the provinces, and in the establishment of the provincial press. Provincial weeklies would be produced to coincide with local market days, to increase sales and as an aid to distribution outside the printing centre itself. The printer would also advertise their trade: the business was usually ‘as much jobbing work or small jobs, including small pamphlets and the like, as it was of books. Many books were also financial, political or legal guides, reference books and vade mecums that were produced in recurrent and popular editions’ (Raven 2014: 100). Apart from newspapers, the first local periodicals might be directories, alongside annual reports of local charitable institutions. During the eighteenth century printing offices were set up in towns throughout Britain in important regional centres of trade and commerce, such as Bristol, Exeter and Norwich. The first established printer in Wales seems to have been in Carmarthen in 1727 (Mitchell 1987: 17–18) and the town remained the most significant printing centre in Wales until the end of the century, by which date at least a dozen other towns had been home to printing offices. In the mid-­ seventeenth century, printing in Scotland was mainly confined to Edinburgh, although presses had been set up at different times in St Andrews, Stirling and Aberdeen, and in Glasgow in 1638. Printing was controlled through the monopoly exercised by the King’s Printer. There was limited expansion before the end of the seventeenth century, but printing offices were recorded in a total of thirty-­nine towns by the end of the eighteenth century, although some had only a brief existence. Ireland’s printing industry was limited to a single office in Dublin until around 1640, and thereafter remained limited by the King’s Patent, which granted its holder a monopoly over all aspects

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production and distribution 75 of the printing trade. The first patent had been granted in 1604, to the Stationers’ Company in London, and this remained in place until 1732, although in the mid-­seventeenth century presses were set up in some towns outside Dublin to print propaganda for warring factions supporting King Charles I, the parliamentarians or the Irish Catholics. Only the printing office in Cork survived during the Commonwealth and controls were reinstated at the Restoration. New printing offices were established at the end of the century, for example in Belfast in 1694 (Kinane 2002: 9–10), though Dublin remained the main centre of the printing trade. In the early eighteenth century the news in provincial papers came mainly from the London papers, and sometimes from other provincial papers. The London papers arrived by post, using the system of post coaches, and articles were sometimes headed ‘latest post’. Provincial papers were distributed through different networks, and as printing offices were set up in commercial centres and market towns throughout the British Isles, newspapers became an important element in their output, being ‘key to the success of larger eighteenth-­century provincial print business, and advertising was central to the viability of newspapers’ (Jackson 2005: 65). The papers advertised the scope of the area they covered (or wished to cover) and were distributed through a network that included local carrier services and agents, who might include innkeepers, schoolmasters and traders in other towns. In the early part of the eighteenth century, when there were relatively few provincial newspapers, the region covered by an individual title might be considerable. Although the area covered by the Northampton Mercury in the 1720s and 1730s, for example, was mainly the surrounding counties, there were agents in Berkshire and Lincolnshire (Jackson 2005: 68). In 1764 the Chelmsford Chronicle listed agents at Harwich, Dedham, Colchester, Brentwood and Braintree, as well as an inn at Epping and a coffee house in Fleet Street (Black 2001: 111–12). These agents not only distributed the papers, but also collected advertisements: in the issue for 4 March 1773, the Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette announced that ‘advertisements can be taken in by agents in St Paul’s Churchyard, Holborn, and four London coffee houses, and in Bristol, Bridgewater, Taunton, Exeter, Sherborne, Salisbury, Southampton, Devizes, Marlborough, Reading’. When the Newcastle Magazine; or, Monthly Journal was launched in Newcastle, the Newcastle Courant advertised that ‘A proper allowance will be made to School-­Masters, &c in the country who wish to become Distributors of this Magazine’ (4 February 1786).

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Newsmen were an important part of the distribution system: the speed of distribution by this means was limited to the pace of a ­packhorse – e­ stimated at approximately twelve miles a day (Armstrong 2005: 23–4). Farley’s Bristol Newspaper employed ‘Two or Three Running Footmen’ in 1726, and in 1743 the Reading Mercury printed in Berkshire claimed to be distributed in the counties of Buckinghamshire, Oxfordshire, Wiltshire, Hampshire, Surrey, Sussex and ‘part of Kent and Middlesex, by fifteen Men who are constantly employ’d for that End’ (cited in Cranfield 1962: 197). As well as its network of agents, the Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette was also distributed ‘by the Newsmen’ through whose agency ‘Authentic Articles of News, and Letters to the Printer, will be thankfully received’ (4 March 1773). As the century progressed, an increasing number of towns were home to printing offices, the competition grew, and by the end of the century the provincial press had become more truly local, serving its immediate area, though the means of distribution, through purchase direct from the printer, subscription and from ‘newsmen’ and other carriers and agents, remained much the same. The newsmen not only distributed the weekly paper, but also other ­goods – ­few printing businesses relied solely on printing as a source of income (Jackson 2005: 68–9). The Norfolk Chronicle, for example, advertised that ‘The Printers of this Paper having been Often asked for DAWSON’s LOZENGES, they are now supplied with a Quantity from BATH’ (18 March 1786, 2).

Conclusion Printing technologies changed little during the period, and despite the increase in newspaper production, neither did the business model on which printing business were based. Newspapers were produced in general print shops, on a schedule timed around other work. These ‘jobs’, which had always been the mainstay of print shops, included personal and business stationery, handbills announcing election meetings, auction sales and race meetings, sermons by local clergy, and many other items. The presses which produced London daily newspapers overnight were employed in this way during the day. Not all provincial printers produced newspapers, but for those who did, the papers provided an advertising medium for the business itself, and conferred some prestige. According to Luke Hansard, apprentice to Mr White in Norwich in the 1760s, there were four printing offices in the city, ‘two of them in far higher repute than Mr White’s as they each published a weekly paper’ (Hansard 1991: 13).

Chapter Three

LEGAL CONTEXTS: LICENSING, CENSORSHIP AND CENSURE Geoff Kemp and Jason McElligott

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his chapter examines the legal contexts in which the press operated in Britain and Ireland in the years between the fall of the Star Chamber in 1641 and the passage of the Act of Union in 1800. Speaking of ‘legal contexts’ points to a broad range of conditions to be considered, since the absence as well as presence of particular laws could mark a context of constraint, by legal and other means, without the freedoms gained being illusory or lacking historical significance. Attention is necessarily directed towards London as the gravitational centre of print production and distribution for the archipelago, but the chapter seeks to extend its purview to the English regions and to Scotland and Wales; and, in our attempt to resist the pull of the English capital, we begin by considering the case of Ireland before turning to its offshore neighbours.

Ireland to 1800 Ireland in the early modern period was a small node on the far western periphery of European trade and information networks (Raymond and Moxham 2016: 19–63). Its centuries of struggle over land, language, religion and political power brought with them interminable instability, intermittent sectarian warfare and inescapable economic backwardness. These malign contexts help to explain the late arrival of printing in Ireland and the subsequent slow development of recourse to the printed word in debates and discussions. Until one side won a decisive victory and began to build the foundations of a new order, swords and gunpowder would be more important than books and printing presses. Print from across Europe circulated in Ireland very soon after 77

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Gutenberg’s startling invention, and a small number of high-­status individuals had personal libraries that were significant in a national context (Gillespie 2005: 13). However, it was not until 1551 that Humphrey Powell published the first book in Dublin using moveable type. Thereafter, printing was slow to develop and consisted mostly of official proclamations from Dublin Castle. The under-­development of Ireland becomes clear by contrasting London with Dublin. In 1641, for example, more than 4,000 separate titles across a range of genres and topics were published in London. The metropolis also housed at least twenty printing establishments and perhaps as many as 200 bookshops and stalls. By contrast, in this same year Dublin had only one printing press which confined itself to producing official proclamations, and there were no more than a handful of bookshops (McElligott 2011: 603). Most printed items read in Ireland throughout the early modern period were imports, mainly from London but also from established continental centres of production. The absence of print as an important factor in Irish politics during the seventeenth century (which is the same thing as saying that there was no ‘print culture’ in Ireland) helps to explain the simplistic nature of the mechanisms that might be used to control printing and bookselling. In 1609 a Dublin-­based printer named John Franckton was made King’s Printer in Ireland. This office gave him control of the production, circulation and restraint of all printed items. Franckton was granted a monopoly on the publication of official declarations, Bibles, grammars, almanacs and ‘all other books whatsoever as much in the English, Irish or any other language’. He also enjoyed the sole right to bind and sell books in Ireland and was responsible for regulating the importation of books (Pollard 1980: 79–95). Franckton’s extensive privileges in what might become a valuable market attracted the attention of the Stationers’ Company of London, and by 1620, after some manoeuvring, the Londoners were granted the rights in Ireland that Franckton has previously enjoyed. However, the profits of this monopoly seem to have been very disappointing and by 1639 the Company had sold its control of the ‘Irish Stock’ to a certain William Bladen. He, in turn, acted as printer to the king and then to the Commonwealth during the 1640s and 1650s. In the turmoil of February 1660, Bladen published the first ever Irish newspaper, the short-­lived quarto An Account of the Chief Occurrences of Ireland, which was designed to rally support for the return of the Stuarts. After the Restoration, Bladen’s collaboration with the Cromwellian regime meant that he was replaced as King’s Printer

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legal contexts: licensing, censorship and censure 79 by a certain John Crooke, who printed Ireland’s second newspaper, Mercurius Hibernicus, for fifteen issues in 1663. The troubled years of the Popish Plot and Exclusion Crisis stirred an increase in printing and publishing and in 1685 Joseph Ray published a quarto-­format News-Letter for around seven months. However, Ireland’s first sustained newspaper had to wait until after the battle of the Boyne when the Williamite half-­sheet Dublin Intelligence appeared for at least 152 issues between 1690 and 1693 (Munter 1967: 6–15). The period between the Restoration and the end of the century was characterised by a struggle on the part of the Crooke family to maintain its monopoly as King’s Printer (Lennon 2006: 68). There were legal disputes with the aforementioned Joseph Ray and the heirs of William Bladen, as well as the more general problem of commercial control in the context of an increased volume of home-­grown and imported printed material. The legal situation became more complex after 1670 with the incorporation in Dublin of the Guild of St Luke, which encompassed three separate professions: stationers, cutlers and painters (Phillips 1998: 3–25). The control of the Guild over bookselling in Dublin technically breached the rights of the King’s Printer, but both seem to have found a practical modus operandi with each other and the commercial realities of the industry. It is only from 1699 that one can trace the continuous production of newspapers in Ireland, and only in 1705 did Dublin Castle finally allow the production of an official newspaper, the Dublin Gazette (Forbes 2018: 45). The anaemic nature of the Dublin newspapers in their first two decades was in stark contrast to the colourful characters and careers of those who produced them. These newspapers were shoddily printed and poorly laid out, and, above all, they scrupulously avoided any mention of Irish politics. Their content consisted mostly of quotations and paraphrases concerning London, British and European news taken from London newspapers that had arrived on the most recent boats to dock in Dublin. There is a sense in these first decades that Irish newspapers (the first Cork title appeared in 1715 and the following year saw the first Limerick paper) were second-­rate copies of London newspapers produced for a very limited audience. The most striking things about the Irish newspaper industry before about 1720 were the small, intimate scale of the industry; the homogeneous religion, culture and politics of those in the trades; and the absence of any overarching legislation which might be used to regulate the production or sale of printed items. As is well known, English (and later, British) measures such as the Printing Act of 1662, the Copyright Act of 1710 and the Stamp Act of 1712 did not apply to Ireland. From

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the 1680s onwards the Guild of St Luke and the King’s Printer found it harder to exercise their potentially very great authority over an increasingly populous trade, and the Irish administration did not bring forward any legislation that might be used against printing, which meant that Irish authors, printers and publishers continued to be free from prior restraint. In practice, however, a broad interpretation of the powers of the Privy Council, Parliament and the courts to deal with matters of parliamentary privilege, blasphemy and libel (both criminal and seditious libel) meant that strict punishments could be imposed whenever newspapers or the pamphlet press stepped beyond the bounds of the permissible (Munter 1967: 100–2, 189–90). Scholars have traditionally viewed censorship as something done to the printing industry by external forces intent on holding the line against a tide of free expression. Yet eighteenth-­century Ireland provides an intriguing example of a society with no system of prior restraint and little, if any, transgressive press output except for periods of instability and turmoil, during which it was possible for the state to exert a strict post-­publication control of the press (Kelly 2008: 142–4, 172–5). The initially apolitical nature and later the carefully non-­controversial politics of most eighteenth-­century Irish newspapers is, then, best understood as a function of the fact that they were produced by men and women who understood and shared the dominant hegemonic ideas as to what was right and proper for circulation in print. Censorship was only ‘needed’, so to speak, when these conventions broke down, first for short periods in 1711–14 and the mid-­1720s, and then for more extensive periods after the late 1740s in connection with the Charles Lucas affair, the Patriot politics of the 1780s and the emergence of the United Irishmen. In discussing legal frameworks for the control of the press in any jurisdiction, one must always be aware of the frequency with which printers, publishers and newsmen experienced harassment, threats of violence or actual physical violence during their interactions with agents of the state. Many arrests never led to a case coming to court, and others that were heard in Dublin’s Court of King’s Bench failed on some procedural technicality, or (less often) the accused might be found not guilty after a trial. Yet the financial and physical ill-­effects of arrest and pre-­trial confinement in custody were often so serious that they must have acted as a severe deterrent to many potential malefactors (Munter 1967: 189). Across the eighteenth century newspapers had to be wary of libelling individuals as the financial penalties and prison time could be

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legal contexts: licensing, censorship and censure 81 very onerous. There would always be an element of ‘hit and miss’ as to whether powerful men would initiate legal proceedings, but at times of crisis they were often encouraged to do so by Parliament or Dublin Castle. During the reign of Queen Anne, the only political pamphlets and newspapers targeted by the authorities were those of a Tory persuasion. Whigs, even those as volatile and violent as the newspaperman John Whalley, never faced fines or imprisonment during these years. However, there was one category of expression that always led to punishment: Jacobitism. Edward Lloyd was forced to flee the country permanently after he used his eponymous News-Letter to advertise a proposal to publish a life of the Pretender. An innocent but inaccurate news report that might potentially give succour to Jacobites would be met with punishment, as the unfortunate Edward Waters discovered in 1708 when he reported that French forces had burned Wicklow town, a little more than 30 miles to the south of Dublin (Munter 1967: 126–9). By 1720 newspapers had become an established, if relatively minor, genre of print in Ireland. Paper and print quality were better, layouts had improved, and an increasing amount of non-­controversial Irish news began to appear. The three or four titles that dominated the industry at this point had cornered the market in advertising. The leading newspapers now began to provide ‘Dublin’ and ‘Country’ news, but even they continued to rely overwhelmingly on English and continental news gleaned from London sources. The self-­restraint of the newspapers concerning the discussion of Irish politics fell away during the febrile controversy surrounding the granting of Wood’s patent for low-­denomination Irish coins, for which several printers of newspapers and pamphlets were punished at law. At the same time the Dublin administration used secret service funds to help finance newspapers that were well inclined towards the government (Secret Service MS 1723, Z3.1.1 (41), Marsh’s Library, Dublin). Once controversy within the Ascendancy died down, however, the newspapers returned to the status quo ante and there was a marked absence of proceedings against newspapers and pamphlets during the 1730s and 1740s (Munter 1967: 151). Disputes between parties grew during the 1740s, coalescing around the person of Charles Lucas and his campaign against the oligarchical nature of Dublin Corporation. This struggle had been ongoing since 1742, but acquired a sharpened focus at the end of the decade around an election for one of Dublin’s parliamentary seats. Many pamphlets appeared for and against Lucas, but he took the initiative by publishing Ireland’s first radical newspaper, the Censor (1749), which in turn

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encouraged other newspapers to enter the fray on either side of the argument (Dickson 2000: 95). When a warrant was issued for Lucas’s committal to Newgate, he was so fearful of the likely punishment that he fled to the Isle of Man. Political debate remained in a heightened state during the 1760s as several issues pitted Irish Protestant interests against those of Britain. The growth of this Patriot movement was reflected in a period of relative freedom for newspapers and pamphlets (Barnard 2017: 59). The Castle tended to rely on the public support of writers and official newspapers, such as the Dublin Mercury, but also used secret funds to buy the unacknowledged assistance of other men and titles. The introduction of a Stamp Act in 1774 was also used to increase costs for those who did not respond favourably to offers of financial assistance from the administration. The few prosecutions of these years tended to be brought by individuals concerning their public reputation (Kelly 2008: 166). The growth of the Volunteer movement meant that the administration began to pay more attention to the press from 1780. The demand in the Volunteer’s Journal of 5 April 1784 for a complete break from England and the editor’s expression of support for the American rebels led directly to a Printing Act that required all those involved with newspapers to register their names and addresses with the stamp commissioners (Inglis 1954: 23–43). The House of Commons used this legislation to open actions for breach of privilege against the Volunteer’s Journal and Freeman’s Journal, while the attorney general began to proceed with ‘informations’ against newsmen in the Court of King’s Bench, a legal mechanism which enabled him to avoid putting cases before a Grand Jury. The state continued to support private suits for libel and made significant amounts of money available to entice newsmen away from opposition. The most notable case was the purchase of the loyalty of the Freeman’s Journal with secret service money. In 1785 the duty on newspaper stamps and the tax on advertisements in newspapers were increased, which had a disproportionate effect on the oppositional press as notices placed by the government in friendly newspapers were exempt from the duty (Inglis 1954: 37–9). During the 1780s the administration perfected the art of encouraging some, threatening all, and severely punishing the most egregious offenders. The control of the press became an urgent matter of public security in the aftermath of the French Revolution and the international spread of Jacobinism. The authorities used the laws surrounding parliamentary privilege, personal libel and seditious libel to attack the organisational structure of the United Irishmen and to harass and

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legal contexts: licensing, censorship and censure 83

Figure 3.1  Freeman’s Journal, 26 November 1796 (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin)

disrupt their printed publications (Kelly 2008: 170). They tried to prevent any paper sympathetic to the United Irishmen from accessing the revenue stamps that would make them legal publications. They were not above encouraging or turning a blind eye to extra-­legal violence used to ransack radical newspaper offices, attack news vendors, or even threaten and assault people buying copies of these titles. In May 1797 the United Irishmen’s Northern Star was finally put out of business when the military entered its Belfast print shop without a warrant and smashed all the equipment. The passage through Parliament of a revised and tightened Printing Act of 1798 was merely a postscript to the very successful legal and extra-­legal repression of the previous years.

London and England to 1695 London had the most commercially developed printing and bookselling industries during the period under review. The remarkably

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centralised nature of print production means that an analysis of the London trade will be used to highlight national trends before 1695. The London book industries were regulated from 1557 by a guild known as the Stationers’ Company, which oversaw the conduct of the trade. Under the terms of its charter, the Stationers’ Company had the right to search the houses and business premises of all printers, booksellers and bookbinders throughout the kingdom for any printed matter and to seize anything printed contrary to statute or proclamation (Siebert 1952: 64–87). The religious and political sensitivities of print culture ensured that the book trade was also overseen by both Church and state. The apex of Church oversight was provided by an ecclesiastical court known as the Court of High Commission, while that of the state was a prerogative court of law known as the Star Chamber. It would be a mistake to believe that, prior to the crisis year of 1641, only the presence of these entities prevented a tide of oppositional and radical print reaching the streets. There were some notoriously severe cases of censorship, such as that which saw William Prynne lose his ears for an imagined slight upon the queen in his book Histrio-Mastix (1634), but apart from a few religious fanatics, most of the king’s subjects had no interest in, or concept of, constitutional change before the late 1630s (Clegg 2009: 164–78). This situation changed rapidly in Scotland due to unhappiness north of the border with liturgical changes forced upon the Scottish Kirk in 1637 by the king on the advice of a small clique of English prelates. Two military conflicts between Charles I and his northern subjects resulted in a humiliating defeat for the king’s forces and a severe financial crisis in London, which in turn necessitated the calling of two fractious Parliaments in 1640 to approve new taxes. An escalating crisis between the king and Parliament was made worse by the circulation of Scottish propaganda in England aimed at Puritan sympathisers. During 1640 and 1641 politics moved from its traditional, refined settings behind closed doors in well-­appointed rooms into the streets of London, a process which called forth ever greater numbers of printed pamphlets for and against a range of religious and political positions. One of the key factors that propelled Britain and Ireland towards a series of disastrous civil wars was the outbreak of a rebellion in Ulster in late 1641 and fears about what Charles I might do to his opponents in England and Scotland if he were able to raise a military force on the pretext of putting down the Irish. In the context of this volume, 1641 is a significant watershed in British history because it marks the point at which print became an important signifier of crisis and a contributor to that turmoil

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legal contexts: licensing, censorship and censure 85 (Raymond 1996: 20–79). It was also the year when serial pamphlets of domestic and foreign news first appeared in London, largely in response to the rapidly escalating crises enveloping Charles’s realms. The rapid increase in the publication of all forms of print during 1641 was, at least in part, both cause and effect of the abolition by Parliament of the Court of High Commission and the Star Chamber. Historians have been struck by the general state of disarray and disorder in London during the Civil War and have accordingly taken a dim view of the ability of the authorities to impose their will upon the printed word. It is true that the system of licensing broke down for a period during the decade, but even during the most chaotic years there was no complete breakdown of pre-­publication censorship or post-­ publication censure (Mendle 1995: 307–32). It is striking, indeed, that the Long Parliament re-­established pre-­publication licensing in 1643, and thereafter each of the periodic attempts to exert control over the book trade brought forth another iteration of a licensing scheme (1647, 1649, 1653 and 1655). The exuberant London press was finally tamed in September 1649 by the new Commonwealth with the aid of the Act against ‘Unlicensed and Scandalous Books and Pamphlets, and for better regulating of Printing’. This legislation aimed to ensure that all forms of print were regulated, but it paid particular attention to the raft of newsbooks that were being produced every week in London. Under the terms of the Act, all printed items would have to be licensed by individuals nominated by the regime. In a clear sign of the perceived importance of serial news, all newsbooks were to be licensed by the Clerk of the Parliament or the Secretary of the Army. The authors of any unlicensed works were to pay a £10 fine or suffer forty days in jail. All offending printers would face a £5 fine or twenty days in jail, and the bookseller or stationer would face a fine of 40 shillings or ten days in custody. The Stationers’ Company was ordered to confiscate and destroy all printing materials owned by any printer who produced unlicensed material. It was further enacted that all printers were to enter a bond of £300 (with two independent sureties of £300 each) for their future good behaviour; all books were to carry the name of the author and licenser; no dwelling-­house was to be let to a printer without notice being given to the Stationers’ Company; and no parts of a printing press were to be constructed without similar notification. Anybody who distributed ‘unlicensed N ­ ews . . . ­or . . . seditious or scandalous Papers, Pamphlets, Books or Pictures’ in the posts would be fined 40 shillings for every item sent (McElligott 2007: 150; 2009: 233–41).

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Shortly after the Act was passed, the author of the long-­running Perfect Weekly Account expressed his willingness to secure a licence (Perfect Weekly Account, 19–26 September 1649, 616). However, all ten non-­subversive London newsbooks disappeared within two weeks as they were denied the necessary permission. The suppressed titles were replaced by two official newsbooks produced under the direction of leading members of the regime (Frank 1961: 198). The subversive royalist newsbooks mocked the Printing Act as a ‘crack-­fart’ and were confident that it would have no effect on them. They were wrong. The sustained activities of a plethora of searchers and official bodies, as well as the Stationers’ Company, ensured that the men (and some women) behind these titles were soon either in custody or had changed sides and were working for the Commonwealth regime. If the months after September 1649 marked the high-­water mark of press control in seventeenth-­century England, it is important to note that this was achieved by fine-­tuning a system of pre-­publication licensing and post-­publication censure that had been developed during the Tudor and early Stuart periods: indeed, the Act of September 1649 quietly borrowed much from the infamous Star Chamber Decrees of 1586 and 1637. The Cromwellians realised that for their system to work it did not have to result in the prosecution of every unlicensed item. Any over-­zealous attempt to enforce the licensing provisions against the entire book trade might have been counter-­productive. As the leading journalist Marchamont Needham explained: it behoves States-­men to know all things, but not to prosecute all ­things . . . ­It is not for new Princes to inflict punishments upon Offenders to the utmost of what they merit: For, so sometimes by such harsh dealings, they rather increase their number than suppresse or amend Them. (Needham 1649: 3) The licensing laws were not expected to ensure that the offence in question never took place. Instead, they allowed for the general supervision of the trade and the punishment of minor transgressions. The system also aided with the identification and control of more serious offences. Censorship and censure did not rely on licensing, although licensing was certainly one part of the architecture of censorship. Infractions that were judged to be at the more serious end of the s­ cale – ­usually those with a religious or political rather than merely commercial ­dimension – ­could be dealt with as blasphemous, criminal or seditious libel. The most serious offences could be proceeded against under the draconian Treason Act of May 1649. One might profitably think of the mechanisms for the control of the book trade as resembling a pyramid,

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legal contexts: licensing, censorship and censure 87 with the most numerous cases involving licensing provisions at the bottom, the libel laws in the middle, and the rarer and more serious cases concerning sedition and treason at the apex. The control of the book trade and the newsbooks was not uniformly tight over the entire Interregnum. The most effective enforcement of the law (then as now) relied on targeted campaigns against certain types of crime. Control of the trade was at its tightest in the two years after the Printing Act of September 1649, and again immediately after the promulgation of Cromwell’s August 1655 Orders against the press (Siebert 1952: 230). The authorities naturally tended to relax their grip on the book trade and move on to more urgent problems whenever they felt that they had achieved their immediate aim of suppressing printed opposition. Censorship and control rarely needed to be played out in the courts of law. The ‘wrong’ verdict from a jury could be counter-­productive, leaving the authorities open to ridicule and undermining their power and prestige, as the Cromwellians found to their cost when the leading Leveller John Lilburne turned his October 1649 trial for printing against the republic into a harangue against England’s new rulers. Control could be a rough business, or one in which there was frequently an implicit threat of violence, hence the presence on the Cromwellian payroll of Marchamont Needham and Thomas Newcombe, who had been involved respectively with royalist newsbooks and Leveller material. Both men could have faced death for treason but while in prison they were given the opportunity to place their skills at the service of the Commonwealth regime. They soon began working as the editor and printer respectively of the newsbook Mercurius Politicus. The example of the Cromwellian period demonstrates that the mere presence of unlicensed or scandalous material was not enough to call forth or enable a crackdown on the press. Instead, what was needed was the presence of talented and determined administrators who believed that it was important to bring printing to heel to protect the existence of the regime. These men, in their turn, required a period of relative stability in which they could focus their attention on the problem at hand. After Cromwell’s Orders of 1655, the only newsbooks on the streets of London were Marchamont Needham’s officially sanctioned Mercurius Politicus and the Publick Intelligencer. The crisis surrounding the fall of the Protectorate and the return of the Rump Parliament in May 1659 inevitably saw an increase in printed polemic. Newsbooks were now such a central part of partisan politics that eight new weeklies, all designed to argue for the Commonwealth and the ‘Good Old Cause’, appeared on the streets of London. The new Weekly

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Intelligencer bemoaned the ‘impudence’ and ‘ignorance’ of anti-­Rump propaganda. It warned that ‘the State’ was ‘now taking a course to suppress’ this material (Weekly Intelligencer, 14–21 June 1659, 1). There were raids and arrests over the summer, but the audacity of the pamphlets grew in direct proportion to the increasing political uncertainty of the times. By November, the commander-­in-­chief of the army, Lord General Fleetwood, was forced to take out an advertisement in official newsbooks to the effect that a pamphlet in circulation which purported to be by him was a ‘meer fiction’ (Politicus, 10–17 November 1659, 16; Publick Intelligencer, 7–14 November 1659, 16). The turmoil continued into the new year, and by March 1660 there were numerous signs of an impending restoration of the monarchy, not least the appearance of openly royalist newsbooks and pamphlets in London and the flight of the journalist Marchamont Needham to the Netherlands. After the Restoration, the Crown took over the two newsbooks it inherited and was successful in suppressing all other serials, a sign of the restored unity of the political nation and its focus on controlling the printing presses. Charles II relied on his prerogative to issue declarations against several seditious works during the first years of his reign, and to appoint licensers for different categories of print (Kemp 2009: 1–11; Siebert 1952: 242). In 1662 Parliament passed a Printing Act, which, like the Cromwellian Printing Act of 1649 and the Star Chamber decrees of 1586 and 1637, relied on a system of pre-­ publication licensing and the oversight of printing presses by the Stationers’ Company (Kemp 2009: 13–19). The printing presses were never entirely compliant during the Restoration, as the 1663 order appointing Roger L’Estrange as Surveyor of the Press made clear: ‘Whereas in contempt of Our Laws & authority many treasonous, Seditious, & unlicens’d Pamphlets, Libells & Papers are dayly printed vended & dispersed . . .’ (Kemp 2009: 50). However, it was always easier to control the production of serial news as these titles had to be produced to a predictable schedule. From 1666 the only newspaper authorised was the London Gazette, a half-­sheet folio which quickly turned its back on domestic news in favour of foreign news, official proclamations and advertisements (Sutherland 1986: 12). The clear legal framework and the singular enthusiasm of L’Estrange in hunting down malefactors meant that those who did ignore the rules could be punished, and those who went further and strayed into the realms of treason could face trial for their lives. The execution of John Twyn in 1664 for printing the ‘Seditious, Poysonous and scandalous Book’ A Treatise of the Execution of Justice was notable because

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legal contexts: licensing, censorship and censure 89 half of the jurymen were members of the Stationers’ Company; their knowledge of the mechanics of printing was essential in returning a guilty verdict on the basis that Twyn could not have printed the offending passages without knowing their content. Licensing was far from universal during the Restoration, with perhaps only 50 per cent of pamphlets receiving the necessary permission, and the production of libels never entirely ceased. Yet relatively few seditious tracts appeared before the crisis year of 1679, and some of those that did appear were printed abroad and smuggled into England (Miller 2000: 56). With the advent of the Popish Plot and the related Exclusion Crisis, Britain was plunged into turmoil and the streets once again became a focus for political debate and disorder. The failure of Parliament to renew the Printing Act in June 1679 was partly due to the pressing nature of debates concerning the royal succession, but also owed something to a calculation by some Whigs that the expiration of the Act would make it easier for ‘their’ polemicists to operate. For the next few years, controls on the press were grounded in the royal prerogative, as they had been in the two years immediately after the Restoration (Crist 1979: 49; Miller 2000: 56). Contemporaries noted the publication of many Whig pamphlets during the summer of 1679, and in early July Benjamin Harris began to publish the Whig newspaper, Domestick Intelligence. Other newspapers inevitably followed Harris’s lead. A spate of prosecutions against Whig pamphlets and newspapers in the first quarter of 1680 (T. Harris 2005: 142; Goldie 2007, I: 558–9) relied on the common law of seditious libel (which required proof of malicious or seditious intent) and the determination of Chief Justice Scroggs to harass defendants before and during their trials, and then to convict. The cumbersome process of securing guilty verdicts led the twelve judges of the Westminster courts to advise the Privy Council in early May 1680 that the king could legally ‘prohibit the printing & publishing all newes Bookes & Pamphletts of Newes whatsoever not licensed by your Authority’ (Siebert 1952: 298). This led to a royal proclamation on 12 May against newsbooks and ‘Pamphlets of News’ not licensed by ‘His Majesties Authority’ (Kemp 2009: 175–6). The result of this prerogative licensing system, as James Sutherland notes, was that a ‘whole summer and autumn went by without a single newspaper appearing on the streets or in the coffee-­houses’, apart from the London Gazette (Sutherland 1986: 16). However, the turmoil created by the Exclusion Parliament that sat for three months from 21 October 1680 brought forth a Whig newspaper called the True Protestant

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Mercury in the days immediately after Christmas. A flood of pamphlets and other newspapers followed during the strife of 1681, but it was hard for the Crown to secure guilty verdicts because Whig control of the City of London enabled them to ‘pack’ juries with sympathetic citizens who refused to convict authors and journalists. During this period, attempts to use the Stationers’ Company to tame the press failed due to intense, internal divisions within the organisation between Whigs and Tories (Tapsell 2007: 101). The Crown now set about producing polemics to counter the Whigs, and a Tory reaction grew in momentum after City elections in the summer of 1682 which returned loyal sheriffs who could pack juries with citizens who would convict Whig defendants (Sutherland 1986: 15–20). By the end of November 1682 all Whig newspapers had been suppressed. Although some Whig pamphlets continued to circulate throughout the rest of Charles II’s reign, the balance of power had shifted decisively in favour of the Crown (Tapsell 2007: 102, 124). James II inherited a loyal book trade and printing industry with only one newspaper (the London Gazette) and one serial that mixed comment and news (L’Estrange’s Observator). In June 1685 the Whig printer William Disney was caught in possession of Monmouth’s treasonous Declaration calling Englishmen to arms; he was executed two weeks later. In July 1685 Parliament voted to revive the Printing Act of 1662 for a period of seven years. James was in a strong position until his Declaration of Indulgence in early 1687, which began a process that ultimately split the political nation. The Observator ceased publication due to L’Estrange’s unwillingness to support the king’s new policy towards Catholics and Dissenters, but it was replaced by Henry Care’s Publick Occurrences Truly Stated (Walker 1974: 693). James soon found that licensers were refusing to grant permission for Catholic books to appear and members of the Stationers’ Company were seizing those already in print. By late October 1688 the king’s situation had deteriorated so much that he used the London Gazette to publish proclamations concerning preparations to resist an invasion and ‘to Restrain the Spreading of False News’ (Kemp 2009: 326–7). On four occasions in the weeks after William’s invasion, anti-­Catholic mobs ransacked the print shop of James II’s official printer, Henry Hills. On 11 December, the very day that James II fled from London, the first issue of the unlicensed Universal Intelligence was published. Over the next four days, three other Whig newspapers were published (Sutherland 1986: 23). Law and order began to be restored after William’s entry into the capital on 18 December, and in early January 1689 he issued an order to the

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legal contexts: licensing, censorship and censure 91 Stationers’ Company and others to search out all ‘false, scandalous, and seditious books, papers of news, and pamphlets’. This had limited effect on the pamphlet press, but the unlicensed newspapers quickly disappeared. In February several new newspapers appeared, but they had all ceased publication by 9 March, helped by the reappointment of the most zealous of Charles II’s messengers of the press, Robert Stephens, the infamous ‘Robin Hog’ (Schwoerer 1977a: 553; 1977b: 859). The most pressing priority for the new regime was to suppress Jacobite propaganda, which led to many arrests and the execution of the printer William Anderton in 1693. The deep political and religious divides between Whigs and Tories, and even the disputes within different factions of each ‘party’, meant that the process of licensing could be hazardous for the licenser himself (Astbury 1978: 298). The Whig-­inclined licenser James Fraser fell foul of the administration in June 1692 and was replaced by the Tory Edmund Bohun, who, in turn, was removed for licensing a pamphlet holding that the king and queen held their crowns by conquest. Daniel Poplar found himself threatened with prosecution for licensing Robert Molesworth’s Whig-­inspired attack on absolutism, An Account of Denmark (Walker 1974: 696). It was clear that a system of pre-­ publication licensing was both problematic and increasingly ineffective in a nation where the governing classes were so deeply divided. In early 1693 Parliament had again renewed the Printing Act, although eleven peers protested that licensing ‘subjects all Learning and true Information to the arbitrary Will and Pleasure of a mercenary, and perhaps ignorant, Licenser; destroys the Properties of Authors in their Copies; and sets up many Monopolies’ (House of Lords Journal, vol. 15, 8 March 1693). The renewal was for only two years and a combination of pragmatic objections and some principled opposition to the Act ensured that it was not renewed in 1695.

London, England and Britain, 1695–1800 On 3 May 1695, at the close of the parliamentary session at Westminster, the Printing Act formally lapsed and compulsory pre-­ publication licensing of presses and print ended in ‘the King’s Dominions’, the Act’s stated purview. In practice this meant London, given that the Act itself had given the city a near-­monopoly on the licensing process to accompany and augment its dominance of the print trade. In other printing locations, where presses were subject to institutional authority of other kinds, existing arrangements regulating print were not immediately affected. This was the case not only in Scotland and

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Ireland, with the king’s printers’ own near-­monopoly, but at Oxford and Cambridge, where the two main non-­London presses allowed by the Act continued to publish under the imprimatur of the university vice-­chancellor. The London-­centred event would nevertheless have far-­reaching effects in removing a legal barrier to printing beyond London and to the regularised publication of news and comment, a contagion that infected the literate and affected all the monarch’s subjects to varying degrees. The end of pre-­publication licensing signified ‘the liberty of the press’ to contemporaries, although none could know that the absence of licensing would endure for the next century and beyond, to a time that did not share the same signification of ‘the press’ or apprehension of press freedom. ‘The press’ in the later sense of newspapers and periodicals was consequence rather than cause of the Printing Act’s expiry, a product of the changed conditions that also featured regular elections and fluctuating ministries from which would emerge a routinised triad of print, politics and public opinion, a ‘political public sphere’ in the influential and fought-­over phrase introduced by Jürgen Habermas (Habermas [1962] 1989; Knights 2005: 48–57; Robertson 2020). The prospect was quickly glimpsed as newspapers entered the market within a fortnight of licensing’s demise: the Flying Post, the Post Boy and Benjamin Harris’s Intelligence Domestick and Foreign, whose first issue on 14 May told how earlier efforts had seen him driven into exile for eight years, though he could now enjoy ‘our Rights and Privileges’. It was already claimed in these weeks that writers recounting recent events ‘take a far greater Liberty than they used to do, since the Act for Printing expired’, although Harris’s arrest the following month for ‘printing false news’ showed the limits of this new freedom, and the news trade was oriented to staying in business more than essaying radical politics (Anon. 1695: 29; Luttrell 1857: 497). John Dunton remarked of his fellow periodical publishers that ‘their Pretence to News, is no better than an Old Design, to enrich the Bookseller, which I don’t tell as a Piece of News; but as a thing acknowledg’d by ev’ry Hawker’ (Dunton 1700: 46). The Marxist historian Christopher Hill held that licensing fell when the ‘men of property’ could trust to the self-­censorship of the press to maintain social control, although the limits to this argument are evident in Harris’s and every subsequent arrest, and in the corollary that a shift from direct control to self-­ imposed caution was ‘all that had changed’, in another historian’s phrase (Hill [1972] 1991: 385; Curran 2011: 148). If the self-­interest of these new journalist-­printers pointed to news routinisation more than radicalism, there was still an information

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legal contexts: licensing, censorship and censure 93 revolution embedded in the consequent rise in news volume, on one calculation increasing to about fifty London newspaper issues (other than the Gazette) in March 1696 and seventy in March 1700, with circulations up to 6,000 copies (Claydon 2013: 60). In 1702 arrived the first London daily, the Daily Courant. Equally significantly in the long run, the previous year had seen the first newspapers in the English regions, the Norwich Post and Bristol Post-Boy, as well as the emergence of newspapers in Ireland noted above, followed in 1705 by the first successful Scots bi-­weekly, the Edinburgh Courant. Wales would have to wait another century for its first newspaper (Ferdinand 1997; Stenner and Smith 2022; Gardner 2015). The question of 1695 being a revolution, a milestone for liberty of the press or the ‘end of censorship’ has engaged lively debate, fed partly by diverging use of historical and modern senses of its terms. ‘Censorship’ has been taken to mean only prior restraint or alternatively all restrictions; however, the language of ‘censorship’ was absent in 1695. It subsequently emerged into relevant usage to refer to the press’s novel role in monitoring manners in polite s­ ociety – f­ or example, the English periodical the Censor (1715) – and later in monitoring ­governance – ­for example, the Irish Censor (1759). Although ‘censure’ by authority was a term heard, only in the following century did ‘censorship’ begin to connote a system of government control of expression. When a political tract at the end of the eighteenth century extolled ‘the censorship of a free press’ it was referring to the press acting for the public in ‘confining the public authorities within their constituted sphere’ (Dana 1800: 72). Using the term to describe press control in Britain and Ireland before the nineteenth century, as we all do, is interestingly anachronistic, particularly to describe a time in the late eighteenth century when liberty of the press and censorship of the press meant roughly the same thing (Kemp 2016; 2019). ‘Liberty of the press’ was understood in 1695 as the de facto freedom to print emerging from the de jure absence of licensing rather than as liberty de philosophia, although the presence of principled opposition to licensing is often underestimated, particularly when using the yardstick of a later conception of media freedom (Robertson 2020). Concerns such as those of the protesting peers in 1693, traversing principle and practice, resurfaced in parliamentary circles in 1694–95, notably in manuscript criticisms of the Printing Act prepared by John Locke, who echoed Tacitus in urging that a man ‘should have liberty to print what ever he would speake’ before attacking monopolising Stationers and defending authorial copyright. Locke’s political associate John Freke reported that even the pro-­licensing bishops were now

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compelled to ‘think property a very popular word, which Licenser is not’ in couching their views (Locke 2019: 93, 322). The dozen printing bills introduced in Parliament over the following fifteen years, including one devised by Locke’s allies, are routinely characterised as attempts to revive licensing, although only one is known to have proposed licensing, a swiftly rejected 1697 bill that also happened to be the only one directed specifically at the rising tide of news publication (Kemp 2012). A licensing initiative attempted in the same year by the Privy Council at Edinburgh proved short-­lived (Mann 2000: 147). By 1699 Locke’s disciple Matthew Tindal was writing of liberty of the press as a natural right, John Milton’s Areopagitica had been republished for the first time since 1644, and MPs were ready to contend in Parliament that ‘the Liberty of the press had greatly promoted the true notions of government and scattered the seeds of liberty’ (Kemp 2012: 60). The idea’s progress over the next century would be about rhetorical expansion as much as conceptual content, ‘liberty of the press’ conceived as the absence of licensing becoming normalised and normative, itself a maxim of authoritative ‘public opinion’ as voiced by the political class and ‘the press’, not least as a badge of a national ‘imagined community’ also articulated in and by print, cross-­cut by nations and regions reimagined through their own newspapers (Anderson [1983] 2006; Stenner and Smith 2022). In 1741 David Hume called it ‘this peculiar privilege of Britain’, and a hundred years after the parliamentary paean above, an assumption at Westminster remained that ‘the liberty of the ­press . . . ­is so peculiarly our own’, with disagreements having long shifted to the role of restriction and intervention by other means than licensing (Hume 1994: 262; Parliamentary Register 1798: 388). Other means of restraint there certainly were, in 1695 and later. Locke’s Tacitean sentence went on to caution that freedom to print anything one would say implied being answerable if one ‘transgresses the law in either’, anticipating Sir William Blackstone’s famous definition in his Commentaries on law of the late 1760s that, ‘properly understood’, liberty of the press ‘consists in laying no previous restraints upon publications, and not in freedom from censure for criminal matter when published’, the prefatorial ‘properly understood’ betraying the growth in arguments critical of the law’s post-­publication application since Locke (Blackstone 1769: 151; Bird 2016). To some, persisting restraints make the association of 1695 and liberty of the press a ‘mirage’ (Keymer 2019: 19). Post-­publication laws and punishments, notably for seditious libel and treason but also for illicit parliamentary

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legal contexts: licensing, censorship and censure 95 reporting and other faults, continued initially unchanged, though destined for increased centrality to the task of press control (Hamburger 1985). The 1696 Treason Act and 1698 Blasphemy Act mainly served as reminders that print could be treasonable and blasphemous. By 1707 further anti-­Jacobite specification was felt necessary, the Succession to the Crown Act forbidding printing against the Acts of 1701 and 1706–7 securing Protestant succession and Anglo-­Scots union. In 1719 it was the basis for 19-­year-­old John Matthews becoming the last printer to be executed in Britain and Ireland, kingdoms that were rightfully those of Charles Edward Stuart, according to the offending tract, Vox Populi, Vox Dei (Chapman 2008; Keymer 2019: 17). Nor did the removal of licensing end all prior restraints and constraints, with the practice of search and seizure by ministerial warrant remaining a regular recourse until the 1760s, along with the suppression of the reporting of Parliament, which also claimed powers to condemn tracts and reprimand those responsible. To these penal and coercive measures can be added other forms of intervention that persisted, emerged or expanded in the decades after 1695, by law and other means, including the regulation of copyright, the economic pressures of stamp duty, and the use of patronage and propaganda by government and partisan interests. However, there is reason to resist following Fredrick Siebert’s influential taxonomy that categorises ‘taxation’ and ‘subsidization’ alongside ‘prosecution’ as ‘methods of press control’ (Siebert 1952: 306). Importantly different in kind as exercises of force and power, such interventions also evade settled agreement on both their intent and effect as ostensible ‘controls’. To return to a Restoration example, Roger L’Estrange saw his prolific journalism as an extension of his licensing in silencing opposition, and likewise his orders to the Stationers to ensure free passage to loyalist tracts: even if an intention was ‘control’ in the sense of dominating public debate, the immediate intent and effect was more political discourse in the public sphere of print, to which L’Estrange contributed an estimated 3.6 million of his own words (Kemp 2008: 181; 2006). The innovations of Robert Harley between 1701 and 1715 were no less ambiguous in approaching the press as a potential propaganda machine for government when in office as ‘prime minister in all but title’. The classic modern account begins by saying that Harley’s press policy ‘encouraged the free discussion in print of important political issues’ and concludes by saying that Harley replaced control through restrictions with control by propaganda (Downie [1979] 2008: 2, 10, 195). Among the results of Harley’s patronage were the writings of Daniel Defoe in the Review and Jonathan Swift in the Examiner and

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(indirectly) a host of rival publications in the unprecedented political contestation of the period. In the latter part of the same period appeared two laws affecting the print trade that proved likewise open to differing emphasis in interpretation: the 1710 Copyright Act and 1712 Stamp Act. On one view, the former aligned with its actual title, ‘Act for the Encouragement of Learning’, by enabling authors or other ‘proprietors’ to secure ownership of copyright in works by registration; on another, registering meant taking responsibility for the work before the law and made the source easier for the authorities to trace. On the one hand, the legislation did not respond to calls for compulsory imprints naming authors; on the other, the copyright ‘deal’ did identify authors for reprisal (Keymer 2019: 17; Goldie and Kemp 2009: 189–93; Kemp 2012). The matter is something of a two-­sided coin, and the emphasis on authors meant that the 1712 law was more pertinent to the press, though the latter’s formal title was little more revealing of a purpose of press control, being an ‘Act for Laying several Duties upon all Sope and Paper’, followed by numerous other products, latterly ‘Certain Printed Papers’. These were newspapers and pamphlets, with duties to be paid on advertisements, and officially stamped as paid, and also the name of printer or publisher in the imprint (Goldie and Kemp 2009: 200–2). The emphasis of interpretation again varies between seeing the motivation as financing government or as squeezing economically the troublesome press, particularly at its cheaper and more popular end (Ferdinand 1997: 12; Keymer 2019: 17). Stamp duty on paper had first been introduced in 1694, and it is telling that this and subsequent laws imposing or increasing duties on printed papers coincided with financing the costs of ­war – ­in 1712 the War of the Spanish Succession, and in 1757, 1776 and 1797 other conflicts (Oats and Sadler 2004: 107). There is also a temptation to view the subject through the lens of the campaign against ‘taxes on knowledge’ in the following century. At the same time, the stamp made the press more open to monitoring and intervention, and there was some effect on viability particularly in the regions, although there are few provably direct casualties among the newspapers that failed, and 135 new papers were set up by 1760 on one estimate (Ferdinand 1997: 12). In commenting a week after the 1712 Act began operation that ‘Grubstreet is dead and gone’, Swift spoke too soon. The press had now reached a stage where, in terms of English law, the era of pre-­publication licensing was in the past; a transition period when it was not clear what, if anything, would replace the old system of control was closing; and the emerging ‘pragmatic’ system saw the

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legal contexts: licensing, censorship and censure 97 authorities rely relatively unsystematically on a combination of post-­ publication prosecution and other measures at particular moments and periods of conflict, the 1715 Jacobite rising the next and not the last. Whiggish myths of freedom’s inexorable advance or British exceptionalism are not needed to appreciate the growth of the press as a functioning commercial model, with a degree of acceptance reflected in the application of legal and executive constraints on a targeted more than systemic model, enacted at crisis points. A simple linear trajectory was ruled out by the recurring nature of crisis or perceived crisis, whether 1715, 1745, 1776 or 1789. Moreover, any overall trajectory was not preordained but involved an empirical societal learning process in which the routinised presence of political disputation in print and based on print not only became familiar but appeared to prove largely consistent with sustainable governance: press freedoms had not destroyed society. Ministers saw that there was nothing inherently oppositional about the provision of printed news and followed Harley in finding ways of securing the support or acquiescence of the press without recourse to law. Law and political intervention nevertheless remained a constant presence in their inconstant applications to the press. Three themes can be identified for further attention as disputed areas moving forward in the eighteenth century: the use of general warrants, the ban on parliamentary reporting, and the role of prosecution for seditious libel. The first two were brought to a head in the 1760s and early 1770s as twin grievances and causes of the oppositional press associated with the political agitation of John Wilkes, who was prosecuted for the third, seditious libel. Siebert supposed no earlier attempts to contest the legality of general warrants, but there were previous protests: for instance, the bookseller Francis Smith resisted arrest in 1680 on the basis that the warrant was contrary to Magna Carta by naming a publication but not the individual or alleged crime (Siebert 1952: 376; Smith 1680: 20 (first of two pages numbered 20)). The practice continued, however, and on one calculation more than seventy such warrants were issued between 1713 and 1759 by the Secretaries of State, an important weapon against the press (Barker 2000: 72). Smith’s heir in protest proved to be the MP Wilkes, after his arrest with more than forty others in 1763 under a general warrant seeking the authors and printers of number 45 of the North Briton for its criticism of the king’s speech. Wilkes and others sued the government for unlawful arrest and won, with further court judgments clarifying the limits of executive action against the press, resulting in general warrants falling out of use, although Wilkes himself was

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Figure 3.2  Caricature of John Wilkes holding the cap of Liberty, 1763 (Creative Commons Licence, courtesy of Wikimedia)

convicted, outlawed and imprisoned on his return (Siebert 1952: 378–80; Barker 2000: 71–2). The reporting of Parliament for much of the period before and after the 1640s was a no-­go area that nonetheless proved irresistible to the press for political and economic reasons, given audience interest, resulting in the limits being regularly tested and incursions rebuffed. Publishing speeches or proceedings at Westminster without permission had always been held to be effectively a breach of privilege, although as with press control in general there were periods of greater and lesser openness. Parliament held an advantage in controlling direct access and being itself a court of prosecution and place of reprimand. However, information boundaries were porous, not least because of MPs themselves, as well as manuscript newsletters, and there was repeated reinforcement by declaring and enforcing the ban on publication. In 1696 the Commons declared it contrary to privilege to name members, while an order of the House of Lords in 1697 against printing cases heard there was both an example of this restraint and

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legal contexts: licensing, censorship and censure 99 confirmation of another dimension of the relation between law and press: the popularity of printed legal proceedings (Knights 2005: 189– 94). The cat and mouse game continued for decades until 1771, when attempts by the Commons and government to have printers arrested for breaching its rules floundered because the necessary compliance of the London city authorities was not forthcoming, with Wilkes, now a leading city magistrate, supported in his resistance by the lord mayor Brass Crosby and the MP and alderman Richard Oliver, who were both briefly imprisoned. Rather than try to force the issue and have Wilkes join them, the ministry retreated and the freedom to report Parliament was tacitly conceded, although in emerging from a mixture of principle and legal-­political muddle and misadventure there continued to be moments of greater and lesser allowance to the end of the century (Thomas 2008; Peacey 2007: 16). Seditious libel, for which Wilkes had been convicted in 1764, was the legal mainstay of official press control throughout the eighteenth century, as post-­publication prosecution and as the usual justification for pre-­publication searches and arrests. Its premise had been set in 1704 in the prosecution of the writer-­publisher John Tutchin for his Whig periodical named, like L’Estrange’s Tory predecessor, the Observator, when lord chief justice Sir John Holt declared that ‘if People cou’d not be call’d to Account for possessing People with an ill Opinion of the Government, no Government cou’d subsist’ (Goldie and Kemp 2009: 117). Criticism and opposition towards the law in the eighteenth century was frequently directed at application in specific cases rather than overtly against this principle, although the idea gained ground as the corollary of the justification of the press being the public’s ‘censor’ of government. Again the trajectory was not linear, varying with political tensions. When David Hume’s much-­reprinted 1741 essay reached its 1777 edition he removed three paragraphs, including the view that seditious libel law could be no stronger except under despotic government, substituting a terse remark that liberty of the press was ‘one of the evils’ unavoidable when the monarch and the people shared in governance (Hume 1994: 3, 261–3). Obstacles to conviction in particular cases began to arise because the Crown and the people shared in the court process, although the underlying issue took time to be made explicit and tested. The principle of trial by one’s peers was held to be met by the jury determining the ‘fact’ – whether the accused published the ­work – ­while the question of its content being seditious was a matter of law determined by the judges. Juries had proved hard to confine and convictions harder to obtain, a possibility increasingly realised as the eighteenth century proceeded.

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The matter reached a head in 1771 when Henry Woodfall of the Public Advertiser was prosecuted for issuing a letter by ‘Junius’ attacking the king: the defence appealed to the right of the press ‘freely to canvass the acts of government’, lord chief justice Mansfield charged the jury with finding the fact and that the court would determine criminality, and the jury made a point of returning a verdict specifying ‘guilty of printing and publishing only’, resulting in an impasse (Siebert 1952: 387). Further trials of a bookseller and printer also failed to produce a guilty verdict, but despite Mansfield being questioned in the House of Lords on the underlying issue, the matter remained undecided, and arose again in the 1784 proceedings against William Davies Shipley, dean of St Asaph, for agitating for electoral reform in print, when the lawyer Thomas Erskine delivered one of his many defences of the jury’s role and the press’s freedom. It was not until 1792 that the Libel Act sponsored by Charles James Fox established that the jury could determine the whole issue as a general verdict. The law of seditious libel remained, but its ability to suppress popular causes was blunted.

Chapter Four

READERS AND READERSHIPS Sophie H. Jones

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n October 1781 an anonymous contributor to the London Courant – describing himself only as ‘No Fool’ – expressed his dissatisfaction with access to the latest periodicals at Peele’s Coffee House. In his complaint, he explained that: As I have a very extensive country correspondence, and wish to know what is going forward in many parts of England, I am naturally in the habit of reporting to your Coffee-­house, to embrace the opportunity it affords me, in common with others, of reading the country news-­papers as they arrive in town . . . (‘No Fool’ 1781) While the intention of ‘No Fool’s’ letter was to chastise the behaviour of other patrons in removing the newspapers from the ‘Coffee-­house’ as soon as they arrived, his brief description of accessing periodicals highlights several important themes regarding the nature of reading the news in the early modern period. First, we learn that reading the news in public settings such as coffee houses was a communal activity, taking place ‘in common with others’. Second, we learn that, in order to satiate readers’ desires to learn ‘what is going forward in many parts of England’, such institutions offered patrons a variety of newspapers and, consequently, a breadth of information concerning both local and regional matters. Third, we learn that those who were reliant upon the content of newspapers privileged the timeliness of such information. Indeed, in this author’s case, it was his inability to access the newspapers immediately upon the evening ‘as they arrive[d] in town’ – instead, through the actions of others, only gaining access the following m ­ orning – ­that triggered his complaint. Thinking more closely about ‘No Fool’ and his fellow readers at Peele’s Coffee House, this chapter focuses upon those persons who 101

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read and consumed printed news in early modern Britain and Ireland between c. 1640 and 1800. Its focus is twofold, considering both individual ‘readers’ as well as those who consumed printed material in more structured associational groups or ‘readerships’. Turning our attention first to explore readers as individuals, the first part of this chapter draws upon current scholarship concerning the history of reading to explore crucial research questions regarding the practicalities of reading printed news in early modern Britain and Ireland. Here, the section begins by defining both contemporary and early modern understandings of literacy, outlining the relationship between reading and writing during the years c. 1640 to 1800 and highlighting the complexities of the relationship between the two skills for present-­day studies of literacy. This first section then explores how literacy varied across distinct regions and contexts within the British Isles, mapping out broad patterns of literacy across the four nations of England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland in turn. In so doing, this section highlights how literacy varied both between and within nations. It also accentuates areas of scholarly consensus as well as opportunities for future research. However, literacy was not simply a consequence of geography alone: this section explores the ­factors – ­beyond broad geographical ­patterns – t­hat might have impacted upon an individual’s likelihood of being able to read, including their gender, economic status, religion and ethnicity. This first section concludes by tentatively suggesting the profile of a ‘typical’ early modern reader. Having explored in detail readers as individuals, the focus of the second part of this chapter is readerships: groups of readers who consumed printed material in more structured associational circles. Here, we explore the growth of institutions that became closely associated with the dissemination and consumption of printed news in the early modern period. As this section highlights, the rapid growth of both the national and the local printed press was made possible through the lapse of (and subsequent failure to renew) the Licensing Act in 1695. Consequently, the chronological focus of this section is primarily concerned with the eighteenth century. Drawing upon recent scholarship and contemporary descriptions, this section considers four distinct spaces in which printed news was freely available to patrons: taverns and inns, coffee houses, subscription libraries and newsrooms. Considering each space in turn, it explores the socio-­economic backgrounds of those who frequented them, as well as asking how news was read and discussed in these places. Despite the notable differences between each type of institution, this section concludes by considering what these spaces shared in common. Finally, through the use of

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readers and readerships 103 a carefully selected case ­study – e­ ighteenth-­century L ­ iverpool – t­he chapter provides illustrative examples of the places in which readerships engaged with printed news in a rapidly developing northern English town.

Readers Thinking first about readers as individuals, in order to access and engage with printed news during the early modern period one first needed to be capable of reading it. Here, an important note must be made regarding the terminology and conflicting methodological approaches used to identify ‘readers’ within existing scholarship. While there exists a wealth of studies that are concerned with tracing and evaluating literacy during the early modern period, a review of such literature reveals the complexity of defining exactly what ‘literate’ means (Raven, Small and Tadmor 1996: 10). With scholars failing to reach a consensus regarding the meaning of the term, multiple conflicting understandings of literacy continue to confuse the intellectual landscape. Although the full intricacies of the scholarly debate are too onerous to consider here, the following paragraphs aim to capture the most salient points. In doing so, they enable us to better understand those persons who read and consumed printed news in early modern Britain and Ireland. Traditionally, literacy has been defined as the ability to read and write (OED). As such, signature evidence in its various f­ orms – i­ ncluding signatures captured in marriage registers, deeds and p ­ etitions – ­has largely been relied upon as evidence of an individual’s literacy. Consequently, scholars have been able to make broad claims regarding literacy, such as David Cressy’s assertion that on the outbreak of the English Civil War in ­1642 – ­the start of our own ­study – ­70 per cent of men and 90 per cent of women ‘were so ­illiterate . . . ­that they could not even write their own names’ (Cressy 1980: 2). However, our contemporary understanding of literacy as one’s ability to read and write is based on nineteenth-­century approaches to education. In so doing, it fails to take into account important seventeenth- and eighteenth-­century understandings of both ‘illiteracy’ and the relationship between the distinct skills of reading and writing. Prior to the nineteenth century, reading and writing were taught separately (Vincent 1989: 10; Ó Ciosáin 2020: 18; Ferguson and Suzuki 2015: 576; Wheale 1999: 2). Crucially for our purposes, reading was taught first: it was an easier skill to teach and learn, it required minimal resources ­ and – ­ particularly among Protestant

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c­ ommunities – ­an individual’s ability to read the Bible and other items of religious scripture was important to their spiritual life (Cressy 1980: 3–4; Ferguson 2003: 68; Fox 2000: 13–17; Williams 2010: 30–31; Helmers, Lamal and Cumby 2021: 3; Houston 1982: 82). In the absence of standardised formal schooling, the responsibility for teaching children to read was often placed on mothers or other female relatives, who thus needed to be able to read themselves (Glover 2011: 27–8). Writing, in contrast, was typically taught to older children. However, bearing in mind Robert Allan Houston’s conclusion that people were educated based on their place in society, many ­children – ­particularly girls, and young boys of the labouring c­ lasses – d ­ id not engage in schooling long enough to learn this second (and, for them, unnecessary), skill (R. Houston 2013: 6; Vincent 1989: 275). Furthermore, thinking more carefully about the etymology of the word, Margaret Ferguson and Mihoko Suzuki argue that early modern uses of ‘illiterate’ referred not to one’s ability to read or write, but to one’s social status and lack of culture (2015: 575–6). For instance, Cotgrave’s 1611 translation of the French term illiteré(e) referred to an individual who was ‘unlearned’ or ‘ignorant’; meanwhile, the more commonly used term ‘unlettered’ indicated that an individual was ‘ignorant of letters or literature’ (Ferguson 2003: 40–1). This early modern understanding, Ferguson claims, is more closely aligned with Greek and Roman uses of the terms agrammaticos and illiteratus, meaning an inability to read Greek or Latin, respectively, or lacking an understanding of literature (Ferguson 2003: 62–3; R. Houston 2013: 4). To complicate matters further, Adam Fox explains that ‘the inability to read represented no barrier to participation in scribal and print culture’, as those who were unable to read a text themselves relied upon others to read it aloud for them (Fox 2000: 44; Cressy 1980: 15). This custom of transmitting printed information in oral ­form – ­sometimes described as ‘bridging’ (Cressy 1980: 14; Brewer 1976: 156) – was common practice during the early modern period. For instance, Fox highlights the role of sixteenth- and seventeenth-­century barbershops and coffee houses as places in which newsletters, pamphlets and other forms of textual information were read aloud and discussed (2000: 39). John Brewer reaches a similar conclusion, noting the common practice of reading newspapers aloud in eighteenth-­century coffee houses (1976: 156); we will consider the social practice of reading aloud in such spaces later in this chapter. Conversely, in more private spaces, those family members who could read transmitted orally printed information to those who could not. Consequently, David Vincent suggests

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readers and readerships 105 that literacy was a skill that was ‘borrowed’ in the early modern home (1989: 275; Colclough 2007: 71). While it is important to be aware of such practices, this chapter focuses specifically on readers, rather than those who interacted with print news via the oral exchange of information. As such, the following discussion is concerned with those who could read. With the above findings in mind, rather than literacy being defined solely in terms of those who could write or sign their names (the ‘literate’), versus those who could not (the ‘illiterate’), more recent works have called for scholars to consider the presence of multiple ‘literacies’. Ferguson and Suzuki, for instance, propose that early modern literacy should be approached as a ‘plural, culturally specific, and gendered set of phenomena’ (2015: 575); meanwhile, Robert Houston claims that ‘it is best to think not of one literacy, but of several literacies, in a variety of ways’ (2013: 3). Thus, for the purposes of this chapter, we are primarily concerned with those persons who could read; however, we appreciate that the ability to read did not necessarily equate with being able to write. Likewise, we appreciate that the inability to write did not necessarily equate to an inability to read. In the absence of a more appropriate term, then, this chapter is concerned with those who Nigel Wheale refers to as the ‘partially literate’ (1999: 3). Having outlined the parameters of how literacy is measured, the following paragraphs consider how the ability to read varied according to both time and place during our period. While at first glance the early modern British Isles appears to provide a discrete geographical and chronological scope, as we shall see this was a period of significant change (Harris 2002: 283). As Houston explains, the early modern period was ‘an important transitional phase in European society and culture’, with communities moving away from the primarily oral-­based societies of the Tudor and Stuart periods to those based on literacy (2013: 1). Broadly speaking, there is a consensus among scholars that literacy increased as the seventeenth century progressed. Furthermore, as we shall consider shortly, even by the end of the eighteenth century there remained significant disparities both between and within the different nations of England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales (R. Houston 2013: 146–55). Thus, the remainder of this section synthesises current scholarship to demonstrate how broad patterns of literacy varied across specific regions and contexts within the British Isles. As part of this assessment, it also questions how specific factors including gender, ethnicity and economic status impacted upon an individual’s ability to access and read printed materials.

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Writing over thirty years ago, William Brewer Stephens provided a historiographical overview of the scholarship on the history of literacy in Britain post-­1500. According to Stephens’s assessment, the ‘bulk of the work’ that had been completed during the mid-­to-­late twentieth century had focused primarily on developments in England, ­which – ­depending on the parameters of each s­tudy – ­occasionally included Wales (1990: 545). Although Stephens noted that a significant body of research exploring Scottish literacy existed, he concluded that this was much less comprehensive. Meanwhile no substantial work on literacy in early modern Ireland had been undertaken. In the decades that have followed, little has arguably changed. With the exception of Houston’s 2013 study Literacy in Early Modern Europe, most studies continue to shy away from a comparative approach, instead providing micro-­ histories of discrete times and/or places. With the complexities of measuring literacy in mind, as well as the difficulties of finding equitable sources to sufficiently compare literacy across national borders, such approaches are understandable. Meanwhile, scholarship on readership in early modern Ireland remains patchy: Raymond Gillespie’s Reading Ireland (2005), which is primarily a social and cultural history of books in sixteenth- and seventeenth-­century Ireland, considers aspects of the history of reading between 1550 and 1700; Rebecca Barr et al.’s recent Literacy, Language and Reading in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (2020) commences in 1800. Thus, with the exception of Toby Barnard’s (2017: 63–72) consideration of newspaper readership in eighteenth-­century Dublin, reading in eighteenth-­ century Ireland remains largely unexplored. Thinking first about England, although we have already acknowledged that literacy is notoriously difficult to gauge and that estimates based on signature evidence are problematic, there is a scholarly consensus that literacy rates were generally higher in urban settings than they were among rural communities (Fox 2000: 19–20; R. Houston 2013: 146–55). As Stephens highlights, ‘Londoners were more often able to sign their names’ than their counterparts in provincial English towns (1990: 556). That said, the ability to read and write was not confined to the metropolis, as Stephens concludes that the n ­ orth – ­particularly the north-­east – ­was one of the most literate areas in eighteenth-­ century England, despite its provincial nature. This he attributes to the number of large towns and cities in the region, many of which (such as Liverpool, the focus of our case study) experienced significant economic growth during the period (1990: 557). For the merchants and craftsmen who resided and traded in such towns, the

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readers and readerships 107 ability to read and write was an important commercial skill (Fox 2000: 19–20). Moving geographically north to consider Scotland, Houston’s extensive research into literacy in early modern Scotland has revealed that, in the Scottish Lowlands, literacy levels were akin to those of their neighbouring northern English counties (Houston 1985: 21). Bearing in mind Stephens’s conclusion that, in the eighteenth century, the north of England was one of the most literate areas of the British Isles, it is perhaps more useful to consider patterns of literacy occurring within what Houston terms ‘cultural zones’ rather than varying according to distinct national borders (1982: 100). Houston attributes this high level of Scottish literacy to the success of the schooling movement which gained momentum during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, during which children were taught to read, if not necessarily to write (1982: 81–2). Indeed, the success of the early modern Scottish education system has resulted in what Houston describes as a ‘literacy myth’ among scholars, with some arguing (he claims, erroneously) that Scotland became highly literate at a much earlier stage than England (1982: 81). As was true in England, urban areas in Scotland typically enjoyed higher literacy levels than rural areas (Houston 1985: 49; 1982: 86). Nevertheless, it is important to remember that such broad conclusions do not necessarily equate to an inability to read among rural populations: for instance, Mark Towsey’s (2011) research into the borrowing records of lending libraries in rural Scotland reveals habitual and persistent reading patterns among rural readers. While those resident in Lowland Scotland were more likely to be able to read and access printed information during our period, more than half of Scotland’s population lived in the Highlands (Houston 1982: 99). Importantly, life in the Highlands was socially, culturally and ethnically distinct compared to that of the Lowlands (Colley 1992a: 314–18). Most notably, Highland society was underpinned by the principle of clanship, defined by Allan Macinnes as ‘a socio-­ economic as well as a political entity, activated by personal obligations and mutual service between the chiefs and gentry who composed the clan elite and their clansmen’ (1996: ix). Many Highlanders were also Gaelic-­speaking, rather than native English-­speakers and t­hus – ­like their counterparts in Wales and I­ reland – ­would need to learn to speak English first before they were able to read and write it. Furthermore, due to their association with the Jacobite cause in 1745, Highlanders were often negatively associated with Catholicism. Whether or not this allegation is strictly accurate remains the subject of scholarly debate;

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however, we will consider how religion affected literacy levels towards the end of this section (Macinnes 1996: 173; Cruickshanks and Cord 1995: xi). With the above factors in mind, Highlanders have traditionally been depicted as being intellectually inferior to their southern neighbours, an allegation that Scottish scholars have challenged. For instance, in 1979, then-­eminent historian Hugh Trevor-Roper dismissed Gaelic language and culture as being ‘sterile and devoid of any original literary merit’ (quoted in Ferguson 1998: 183). Even Houston describes the Highlands as ‘a wild and remote area where traditional social and family loyalties limited the extent of assimilation to the institutional changes taking place elsewhere in Scotland’ (1985: 71). Despite the somewhat problematic start to his assertion, Houston makes an important point regarding the spread of literacy in English in the Scottish Highlands, as Highlanders failed to engage with the aforementioned schooling movement which spread through the Lowland counties. ­Instead – ­and in spite of systematic efforts by the British government to repress their traditional ways of life during the mid-­to-­ late eighteenth century (Macinnes 1996: 211–19; Devine 2003: 119; Lenman 1980: 263) – Highlanders remained largely unable to read, write or speak English for much of the early modern period (Houston 1985: 71–9). In many respects, patterns of literacy in early modern Wales share much in common with those of England and lowland Scotland. ­However – b ­ earing strong similarities to Ireland and highland S ­ cotland – ­much of the Welsh population was primarily Welsh-­speaking, rather than English-­ speaking. This adds an additional level of complexity for understanding the spread of literacy, which requires some unpacking here. Geraint Jenkins notes that literacy in seventeenthand eighteenth-­century Wales was facilitated by two separate forces: namely, the growth of Welsh Dissent and the charity school movement (1987: 196–8). Dissenting academies were established in Wales as early as ­1672 – ­the first by Samuel Jones at Brynllywarch in Llangynwyd. Dissenting schools continued to be founded in Wales throughout the seventeenth century, providing education to those who were excluded from the English universities on religious grounds. Meanwhile, two separate charity school m ­ ovements – ­the Welsh Trust and the Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK) – introduced a series of charity schools throughout Wales. Propelled by the efforts of Englishman Thomas Gouge, eighty-­seven charity schools were founded by the Welsh Trust in all but one of the Welsh counties between 1674 and 1681. Viewing Wales as a tabula

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readers and readerships 109 rasa, Gouge and his contemporaries hoped to use education to convert Welsh children to Protestant Christianity. Importantly, children were taught using both Welsh-­language and English-­language reading materials, in the hope that through learning English, Welsh children would become ‘more serviceable to their country and live more comfortably in the world’ (Jenkins 1987: 198–200). The SPCK, meanwhile, picked up in 1699 where the Welsh Trust left off; in many instances SPCK schools were established in the same towns that had formerly held Welsh Trust schools. Under the direction of its founder Thomas ­Bray – ­who also introduced a series of important parochial lending libraries across England, Wales and the North American colonies (Laugher 1973: Perkin 1998: 193; Kelly 1966: 104–10) – the SPCK similarly saw education as a means of conversion. Unlike the Welsh Trust, however, the SPCK insisted that children were to be taught solely in English; Jenkins argues that the SPCK ‘made no secret of its contempt for the Celtic languages’ (1987: 203). While the SPCK charity schools initially enjoyed great successes, support for the movement languished after ­1715 – ­when, as Jenkins notes, the Welsh Dissenters promptly withdrew their support in response to the 1714 Schism A ­ ct – ­and by the late 1720s the SPCK’s work in Wales had drawn to a close (Jenkins 1987: 200–2). Charity schools fared best in Anglicised market towns, where they were attended by the sons and daughters of merchants, traders and craftsmen (Jenkins 1987: 203). Thus, akin to the urban centres of England and lowland Scotland, the likelihood of an individual being able to read was probably comparatively high in these spaces. Conversely, in rural areas where the children of tenant farmers and labourers were required to perform work in the home, schooling was not considered to be a priority (Jenkins 1987: 202). In a pattern that we have seen replicated across the early modern British Isles, for these families, education was an unnecessary expense. That said, this unwillingness to take up formal schooling does not necessarily equate to an inability to read among the rural monoglot Welsh population. During the first half of the eighteenth century, rural reading s­ chools – ­often led by curates or w ­ idows – t­ aught poorer children basic reading skills. This was supported by the increased availability of Welsh-­language printed texts, including the Welsh Bible and other religious reading material; such texts became particularly popular among the rural poor and could be used at home to support reading instruction (Jenkins 1987: 205). Turning finally to consider Ireland, in the absence of a comprehensive study of early modern Irish literacy, it is not possible to produce

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a similar comparison here. However, with recent scholarship on the history of reading in nineteenth-­century Ireland in mind, it is possible to draw some tentative conclusions about reading ability in Ireland during the eighteenth century. Perhaps most notably, Barr et al. (2020) highlight the importance of the nineteenth c­ entury – ­rather than the eighteenth ­century – ­as a period of ‘literacy transition’ in Ireland. This later development, when compared to mainland Britain, is partly attributed to Ireland’s rural economy, which Barr et al. describe as ‘an impediment to literacy’ (2020: 5). As we have already seen elsewhere across the British Isles, the ability to read was (broadly speaking) associated with urban, rather than rural, communities, who arguably had both the commercial necessity to read books and the financial weight to purchase them. For rural Irish ­labourers – l­ike their counterparts in ­Wales – ­the ability to read was an expensive and unnecessary skill (Ó Ciosáin 2020: 18; R. Houston 2013: 6). Thus, Gillespie concludes that the consumers of books (in other words, readers) in seventeenth-­ century Ireland were primarily ‘the upper social stratum of the literate population, those who had time and money to acquire books and possibly read them’ (2005: 20). However, literacy in Ireland was also closely bound up with Anglicisation (as in Wales) and imperialism: children who were taught to read were taught to read in English, rather than in Irish (Ó Ciosáin 2020: 25; Barr et al. 2020: 2; Barnard 2017: 17). As Gillespie notes, Gaelic society was largely an oral society, in which traditions such as storytelling and public memory were preferred to the perceived unreliability of print- and text-­based information. Consequently, ‘in many respects oral communication continued to dominate the world of early modern Ireland’ until the end of the seventeenth century (Gillespie 2005: 10). In contrast, the settler families from England and lowland Scotland who colonised Ireland during the seventeenth century (Agnew 1996: 3) – eventually taking both land and power from indigenous Gaelic ­families – ­were native English-­speakers and perhaps more familiar with printed materials, thus benefiting from an immediate advantage when learning to read (and possibly to write). As these families settled primarily in the north-­east of Ireland, this perhaps accounts for what Ó Ciosáin describes as a ‘highly literate north-­east’ which ‘contrasted with an illiterate west coast’ during the nineteenth century (2020: 15). Indeed, Gillespie notes the formation of a book ­club – t­ he Presbyterian ‘Belfast Society’ – in literate north-­east Ireland as early as 1705 (2005: 20). While the above discussion has demonstrated that it is certainly possible to trace broad patterns of literacy across the British Isles during

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readers and readerships 111 the early modern period, the likelihood of an individual being able to read was not necessarily influenced by their geographical location alone. Rather, as Houston rightly notes, literacy was closely tied to factors including an individual’s social status, economic need and living or working environment (2013: 6). We have already seen how those in urban spaces were more likely to be able to read than their counterparts in rural areas. For those engaged in trade as merchants and craftsmen in urban centres, literacy was a desirable economic skill; such individuals were also more likely to be able to afford schooling for their children, particularly their sons, who were primed to inherit the family firm (Jones and Talbott 2021: 22). In contrast, for poorer labourers and local farmers, education ‘diverted children from more gainful and necessary duties at home’ (Jenkins 1987: 202). We have also considered how ethnicity impacted upon literacy: those who primarily spoke ­English – ­including those resident in England, lowland Scotland or anglicised Welsh ­towns – ­had a distinct advantage compared to those who were monoglot Celtic-­speakers (whether they spoke Welsh, Irish or Gaelic). We have not, however, thus far considered how gender and religion impacted upon literacy. As Ferguson and Suzuki highlight, women’s literacy is particularly complex; they describe it as ‘a historical situation that we can only partially reconstruct’ (Ferguson and Suzuki 2015: 575). It is broadly accepted that women were less likely to be able to write than their male counterparts. For some families, as detailed above, it was too costly to keep girls in schools long enough for them to learn the skill of writing. For others, especially prior to the mid-­eighteenth century (Glover 2011: 28–9), writing was simply not on the curriculum: both Ferguson and Deborah Simonton note that in some early modern schools (particularly Sunday schools), girls were taught to read and sew, but not to write or perform sums (Ferguson 2003: 68; Simonton 2005: 38–40). Female literacy was also dependent on economic need and social status, particularly when a daughter’s education would provide an advantage to the family unit. For wealthier families, a fashionable education enabled elite women to engage in polite conversation with others. In demonstrating not only their own civility, but also their capacity to provide intelligent (but not radical or threatening) company, such women thus increased their prospects of marriage. Meanwhile, for mercantile families, a rudimentary education equipped women with the skills to perform basic arithmetic and accounting; these skills provided practical and commercial advantages, enabling women to complete business transactions as well as managing household accounts (Hunt 1996: 81–5; Simonton

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2005: 45, 52; Glover 2011: 28–30). Indeed, both Houston and Helen Dingwall note that female literacy was often higher among older women and widows, who may have learned their skills during adulthood or through their occupation; for instance, as merchants in their own right (Houston 1982: 93; Dingwall 1999: 155–6). Nevertheless, while women were less likely to be able to write, this does not mean that they were unable to read: we have already considered the crucial role played by ­women – ­both mothers and widows in charity s­ chools – ­in teaching children to read (Simonton 2005: 35; Glover 2011: 28); meanwhile Jacqueline Pearson and Richard de Ritter both note the celebration of women’s reading and its association with female virtue, particularly towards the end of our period (Pearson 1999: 7–8; de Ritter 2014: 6–9). Religion’s impact on an individual’s ability to read is also complex. As we have seen, Protestants were encouraged to read religious scripture for themselves, with the Bible (whether printed in English or Welsh) forming a key text in basic reading instruction (Cressy 1980: 3; Ferguson 2003: 68; Fox 2000: 16; Houston 1985: 82). Consequently, the ability to read is believed to have been higher among Protestant communities in the British Isles: for instance, Christopher Smout’s (1982) study of the religious community at Cambuslang in mid-­ eighteenth-­century Lanarkshire reveals that all of the participants, both male and female, could read, despite being unable to write. This was also true for those who practised the Dissenting religions; as Jenkins notes, the anglicised Welsh towns in which charity schools were most ­popular – ­such as Wrexham, Cardiff and ­Swansea – ­were places where Dissent ‘thrived’ (1987: 195). In contrast, Catholics were not encouraged to read the Bible in the same way and consequently are thought to have been less likely to be able to read than their Protestant counterparts (R. Houston 2013: 157–62). This may (in part) have contributed to the lower literacy rates in the Catholic regions of highland Scotland and rural Ireland. Thus, with the above assessment of existing scholarship in mind, the ‘typical reader’ of the early modern press (if such a person were to exist) was likely to have been an urban dweller, resident in a small town or city either in England, lowland Scotland or the Anglicised towns in Wales and northern Ireland. They were likely to have received a small amount of education, perhaps at home or at the local school, and ­they – ­or their ­family – w ­ ere likely to have held some level of economic status in order to afford a rudimentary education. Finally, they were likely to have been Protestant or Dissenting, and a native-­English speaker. With said characteristics in mind, the following section moves away

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readers and readerships 113 from the idea of the reader as an individual to consider readerships: those who consumed printed material in more structured associational groups.

Readerships During the eighteenth century particular institutions became closely associated with the dissemination and reading of printed news (Williams 2010: 17). Some of these ­establishments – ­including coffee houses and t­ averns – w ­ ere well established by the start of our period, while ­others – ­such as newsrooms or subscription ­libraries – ­were new innovations. Regardless of their origins, what these public (or, as we shall consider, semi-­public) spaces share in common is that, in them, individual readers congregated in groups to read printed news. In so ­doing – ­and thinking back to ‘No Fool’s’ description of accessing the newspapers with which this chapter b ­ egan – r­ eading became a communal activity, performed in the company of others. The following paragraphs consider each of these institutions in turn and consider the different readerships, or groups of readers, who patronised them. It is important to note that, although our study begins in 1640, this associational form of reading the press was primarily an eighteenth-­ century phenomenon and was only made possible through the lapse of (and subsequent failure to renew) the Licensing Act in England in 1695. Under the terms of the Act, printing in England and Wales was restricted to London and subject to a government monopoly, denying freedom of the press to prospective printers. T ­ hus – ­with the exception of printed newsbooks, which briefly flourished during the collapse of state authority between 1641 and ­1655 – ­state-­controlled censorship significantly restricted the development of the press in England, particularly in the provinces (Harris 2002: 284; Cranfield 1962: 7; Williams 2010: 44–8). Described by Hannah Barker as a ‘watershed in newspaper history’ (2000: 1), the early eighteenth century witnessed a sharp increase in the numbers of new publications founded and printed across the British Isles, including newspapers, periodicals and magazines. In London, John Brewer estimated that there were four daily newspapers and at least five tri-­weekly papers in circulation by 1760 (1976: 7). Meanwhile, estimates for English provincial newspapers suggest that there were at least twenty individual titles in circulation by the 1720s; Barker argues that their number had more than doubled by the 1750s (2000: 29). These figures are even higher when newspapers, magazines and periodicals are considered collectively (Cranfield 1962: v). By the close of the eighteenth century

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there were nine Scottish papers (including those printed in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen); meanwhile, in Ireland, Dublin alone boasted fourteen papers, with other titles printed in the provincial towns of Cork, Belfast, Limerick, Waterford and Kilkenny. The first Welsh paper would not appear in print before the nineteenth century (Williams 2010: 49; Harris 2002: 286–7; Barnard 2017: 64). With this rapidly expanding market in mind, the following paragraphs consider groups of ­readers – o ­ r ‘readerships’ – by exploring the spaces and institutions in which communal reading of printed news and information took place. Recent scholarship highlights the importance of taverns to early modern social, cultural and political life. Taverns were multifunctional spaces: they offered patrons a range of practical services including food, drink and lodgings; however, they were also venues for politicised socialising, serving as both meeting places for formal political associations and as spaces for ad hoc debates or the signing of petitions (Kümin and Tlusty 2002: 3–8; Chartres 2002: 222–5; Chalus 2000: 675). According to Beat Kümin and B. Ann Tlusty, the early modern tavern ‘hosted much of local cultural life, as well as providing platforms for political and religious discussions’ (Kümin and Tlusty 2002: 9). Taverns were commonly found across the British Isles (and, indeed, across the Anglophone Atlantic world), in rural spaces as well as urban centres. Brewer estimates that in London alone there were more than 200 inns and 450 taverns by 1739. While this figure would have been significantly lower in provincial towns, even in smaller communities taverns provided a public meeting place for patrons which facilitated political discussion and the development of local political culture (Brewer 1976: 150; Rogers 1989: 399). In contrast to institutions such as newsrooms and subscription libraries, which we shall consider shortly, contemporary commentators often associated taverns with disorder (Brewer 1986: 27). Indeed, Kümin and Tlusty concede that debates and discussions held in taverns ‘at times evolved into subversive or openly rebellious activities’ (2002: 9). This was largely due to their relative accessibility compared to other, more exclusive establishments, as taverns were frequented by those from more humble backgrounds as well as the burgeoning middling sort. Importantly for our purposes, taverns and inns were places where readers could both access and discuss printed news. As Barker notes, newspapers were supplied for free in such institutions, removing the barrier presented by their cost and thus making them accessible to those who could not otherwise afford them (Barker 2000: 36; Colclough 2007: 99; Williams 2010: 57). This reading of newspapers

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readers and readerships 115 might have taken place on an ad hoc or informal basis in the manner described by ‘No Fool’ at the outset of this chapter, with patrons jostling to access the most recent issues and reading texts aloud; alternatively, readers might have been part of more structured associational groups, with the express purpose of reading to stimulate discussion. In Liverpool, for instance, a group of like-­minded individuals regularly met at the Talbot Inn to read and discuss periodicals and literature. They formed one of three societies that would eventually constitute the Liverpool Library in 1758, the other two meeting at a private house and at the Merchant’s Coffee-­House, respectively (Kelly 1966: 126). Indeed, despite their perceived humble origins, taverns and inns are closely connected with the history of reading in the eighteenth-­century British Isles, with many book clubs and reading societies selecting their local tavern as their chosen meeting place (Kaufman 1964: 3; Manley 1999: 80; Towsey 2016: 2; Stoker 2006: 272–3; Raven 2006: 249). The dichotomy between informal, ad hoc reading and more structured associations emphasises the dual nature of the early modern tavern, which was simultaneously both a public and private space. As Kümin and Tlusty note, although the tavern was theoretically public, meetings could be held behind closed doors in rooms hired for the purpose, thus excluding others from the conversation (2002: 9). Indeed, it should be remembered that taverns were also largely male-­dominated spaces; while we have considered elsewhere that many women were able to read printed news, social convention excluded them from participating in tavern-­based activities (Chalus 2000: 675). As we briefly considered at the opening of this chapter, coffee houses also served as places where early modern readers could access printed news (Ellis 2018: 53; Williams 2010: 56–7). Popularised in Europe during the seventeenth ­century – ­although their origins date back much earlier to the fifteenth-­century Ottoman E ­ mpire – t­ he first coffee houses in Britain were initially founded in London in the 1650s to serve the popular new beverages of coffee and chocolate (Cowan 2005: 90–5; Lillywhite 1963: 9; Ellis 2018: 55). By the eighteenth century they had become popular venues for polite sociability across provincial Britain and Ireland, with patrons engaging in political and literary conversation, sharing gossip or simply reading the newspapers (Cowan 2005: 101–5; Turberville 1926: 88). In these spaces, as Markman Ellis notes, reading was ‘public, sociable and integrative’, with coffee house patrons reading texts aloud to each other and discussing their contents (2018: 72). In this way, those who were unable to read could gather around those who could and subsequently join in with such discussions (Barker 2000: 54; Brewer 1976: 156).

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In contrast to taverns and inns, coffee houses were primarily an urban (rather than a rural) institution. Brewer estimated that by 1740 there were 550 coffee houses in London alone. However, they were also found in smaller provincial towns and cities; while their numbers depended on the relative size of their host town, Brewer concludes that there was ‘at least one [coffee house] in most substantial market towns’ (1976: 7). As ‘No Fool’ suggested, coffee houses offered both the London newspapers as well as what he termed the ‘country news-­ papers’ – the provincial papers (Gardner 2016: 2) – both of which were supplied to customers for free (Barker 2000: 57; Colclough 2007: 70). In Liverpool, for instance, the coffee houses provided both the London papers and the Irish papers (Brewer 1976: 150). Like taverns, coffee houses are also closely intertwined with the history of reading, serving as meeting places for eighteenth-­century book clubs and reading societies. As we will consider shortly, several subscription libraries (including the Liverpool Library) were initially located in coffee houses as they lacked purpose-­built premises in which to store their collections (Allan 2008a: 54; Stoker 2006: 272–3; Kelly 1966: 125–6). Meanwhile, as Ellis rightly highlights, in addition to providing patrons with newspapers and pamphlets, several coffee houses developed permanent library collections of their own (2018: 54). While coffee houses were theoretically public spaces, in practice they were not accessible to all. In contrast to taverns, which were accessible to a much broader section of the population, coffee houses tended to cater to the burgeoning middling sort, including merchants who might both conduct their business in the coffee house setting and consult the latest newspapers with their business prospects in mind. Coffee houses were also male-­dominated spaces and thus not accessible to women (Norton 1976: 400; Manley 2007: 399). Finally, as the eighteenth century progressed, in towns where there were multiple coffee houses, specific establishments became associated with particular factions or social groups. In London, for instance, there were coffee houses that catered to the large number of American colonists who were resident there, while certain coffee houses were also known to be Whig or Tory (Lillywhite 1963: 27–9, 878, 908, 985, 1030). Turning now to consider a more formalised type of readership, subscription ­libraries – ­known interchangeably as ‘social libraries’ in North American h ­ istoriography – ­were another space in which readers could freely access printed news and periodicals. In contrast to the public spaces of taverns and coffee houses, subscription libraries were private, voluntary associations which were jointly owned by shareholders (sometimes called proprietors) and maintained by the

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readers and readerships 117 payment of annual subscriptions. Such institutions are often cited as indicators of the sociocultural development of early modern communities in the eighteenth-­century British Isles: Rosemary Sweet cites the presence of a subscription library as evidence of politeness, while for Peter Borsay, libraries represent an important indicator in tracing his so-­called ‘urban renaissance’ (Sweet 2002: 361; Borsay 1977). However, it is important to note that the subscription library was a colonial ­American – ­rather than an E ­ nglish – ­innovation, the first of which was the Library Company of Philadelphia, founded in 1731. In a reversal of the common trend which saw new institutions (such as the above-­mentioned coffee house) spread from the metropole to the provinces, subscription libraries originated in the provinces and spread to the metropole: the first libraries based upon subscription in the British Isles were founded in western S ­ cotland – i­n Leadhill (1741) and Kelso (c. 1750) – during the 1740s, while the first English subscription library was not founded until 1758. Although fewer in number than their English and Scottish counterparts, recent research has also confirmed the existence of subscription libraries in ­Ireland – ­in Belfast, Down, Dublin and ­Cork – ­and in Pembroke in Wales. James Raven describes the eighteenth century as witnessing a ‘library revolution’, with subscription libraries founded in developing towns and cities across Britain and Ireland (1996: 175). Subscription libraries were also largely an urban phenomenon and, while they typically shared a similar structure and rules of operation, David Allan rightly notes that the exact size and membership profile varied as the model was adapted to suit the local needs of the host town (2008a: 72). For instance, several subscription ­libraries – ­particularly those founded in the latter decades of the eighteenth c­entury – ­permitted female members, including single women, married women and widows. Indeed, of the 491 members of the Norwich ‘Public Library Society’, 93 (19%) were women. Conversely, the eighteenth-­century membership records of the ‘Library Societies’ of Cork and London, respectively, do not include any female members (Norwich Public Library, 1796; Cork Library Society, 1801; London Library, 1791). While the rulebooks of such institutions do not provide an explicit explanation for this disparity, it may have been influenced by contemporary norms concerning female property holding (and, therefore, shareholding) as well as the perceived differences in what counted as ‘appropriate’ reading material for men versus women (Jones 2021: 116–17; Pearson 1999: 42–86; Glover 2011: 29–30). Thinking about the socio-­economic background of library members, the cost of purchasing a share in the ­library – ­in addition to the annual subscriptions required to maintain ­it – p ­ riced

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out the poorer and labouring classes, meaning that library membership was predominantly drawn from the burgeoning local middle classes. However, what constituted the ‘middling sort’ varied from town to town; as such, libraries set their own price points in order to attract and retain their desired members. As Towsey has shown, in smaller rural towns, such as Wigtown in south-­west Scotland, members were drawn from more humble professions including millers, tailors and an innkeeper (2009: 460). As this chapter has suggested, the histories of subscription libraries, coffee houses and taverns often overlapped. With many libraries lacking independent, purpose-­built premises, their collections were often housed in private rooms in coffee houses and taverns, or other public buildings (Manley 2020: 3). Hence, as Raven highlights, these libraries were of an ambiguous nature, being simultaneously both public and private: not only were they physically contained in an otherwise public building, but they were also considered to be ‘public’ in the eighteenth-­ century sense of the word, distinct from the ‘private’ libraries that individuals might keep in their homes; however, they were privately owned by a clearly defined group of subscribers and accessible only to themselves and those they deemed suitable (Raven 1996: 176; Shera 1949; 22). Despite some subscription libraries calling themselves ‘circulating libraries’, they were markedly different in both organisational structure and in the nature of their collections from circulating libraries: commercial lending libraries, usually operated by printers and booksellers, from which subscribers borrowed books in exchange for a fee (Allan 2015: 107; Raven 2006: 251–4; Stoker 2006: 271–2; McCann 2006: 278; Kelly 1966: 143–9; Beckwith 1947: 81–2; Ollé 1967: 51–61). In contrast to subscription libraries, commercial lending libraries were frequented by women and were negatively (and, arguably, unfairly) associated with fiction and novels (Mandelbrote and Manley 2006: 1; Raven 2006: 254–7; Innes 2006: 290). Regardless of these complexities, patrons of eighteenth-­century subscription libraries participated in communal ­reading – ­including the reading of printed news, pamphlets and p ­ eriodicals – a­ nd engaged in conversation about the texts that they had read (Raven 1996: 176). One final space that is deserving of consideration is the newsroom (Harris 2002: 290). Another innovation of the eighteenth century, newsrooms were often closely associated with coffee houses, libraries, inns and hotels (Moss 1799: 102; Barker 2000: 36; Kelly 1966: 126). Perhaps owing to their intimate connection to other institutions and their ephemeral nature, newsrooms have been hitherto largely neglected in the historiography of reading printed news. However, in a

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readers and readerships 119 significant contrast to the multifunctional spaces of coffee houses, taverns and even subscription libraries, newsrooms were solely concerned with providing access to and the reading of printed news. William Moss’s Liverpool Guide provides a contemporary description of an eighteenth-­century newsroom. Referring to the plans for Liverpool’s Athenaeum (explored in more detail in the case study below), Moss explained how ‘One third part of the subscriptions [was] to be laid out in the purchase of newspapers, reviews, magazines, pamphlets and other periodical works’, while the remaining funds were to be used to purchase books for the library (1799: 102–3). The newsroom and library were also physically separate, as ‘The ground floor is appropriated to the news-­room; and the upper parts are intended to be so to the library and reading rooms’ (1799: 102–3). The newsroom at the Athenaeum was exclusive by design, with Moss noting that ‘no stranger can be admitted; unless introduced, at each admission, by a proprietor’ (1799: 102–3). While he notes (with some disappointment) that this stipulation was ‘so much at variance with the usage and liberal spirit of the town of Liverpool’, Moss explains that the exclusivity of the Athenaeum newsroom was the consequence of misuse and overcrowding of the earlier, otherwise unknown, newsrooms within the city. As he explains, it ‘arose from the misuse of the indulgence hitherto granted at the other news-­rooms, to the almost exclusion of many of the subscribers, by the great numbers of strangers that frequent them’ (1799: 102–3). From this account we can conclude two things: first, that newsrooms were maintained by the payment of subscriptions, with non-­subscribers being labelled as ‘strangers’; secondly, that a newsroom’s relative accessibility or exclusivity was dependent on how effectively the entry rules that governed each individual newsroom were enforced. The above paragraphs have explored the various establishments and institutions, both existing and new innovations, in which early modern readerships might access the rapidly expanding market of printed news. As we have seen, these spaces ranged from the humble environment of the tavern to the more fashionable coffee house, through to the exclusive, members-­only environment of the eighteenth-­century subscription library. Throughout our assessment we have explored the types of readers who might have frequented such spaces, as well as those who did not; the poorer and labouring classes were structurally excluded from the members-­only environments of the subscription libraries and less likely to have frequented coffee houses, which were dominated by middling merchants and professionals. Meanwhile, social convention saw women being largely excluded from the so-­called

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public spaces of coffee houses and taverns, b ­ ut – ­dependent on the rules of the individual ­institution – ­they might have become members of subscription libraries. We have also considered the impact of the local environment upon the provision of such places, specifically the differences between urban and rural settings. Despite their differences, what the institutions explored in detail above share in common is that they were places in which individuals could access printed n ­ ews – ­in the various forms of newspapers, periodicals, magazines, reviews and p ­ amphlets – a­ nd engage in discussion with others regarding the items that they had read. While the specific settings might have been different, and the quality of the conversation would have varied significantly depending upon the knowledge of the participants, we have seen that early modern readers engaged in a shared and similar process of communal reading: in each of these spaces, newspapers and printed news were shared by patrons, read aloud and debated. While arguably the level of politeness might have varied between the institutions considered above, all four were venues for politicised socialising, fuelled by the content of the early modern press.

Conclusion Adopting a broad geographical and chronological scope, this chapter has considered those individuals who read and consumed printed news (in its various forms) in early modern Britain and Ireland. Assessing first the practicalities of reading in the early modern period, the first part of this chapter began by questioning modern scholarly definitions of literacy, highlighting the conceptual and methodological challenges facing scholars of the history of reading. As we have seen, seventeenthand eighteenth-­century understandings of literacy perceived reading and writing to be two separate skills; consequently, these were taught separately, with reading often being taught first. In the absence of formal structured schooling, many were able to read, but were not necessarily able to write. With such precautionary warnings in mind, the chapter then drew upon existing scholarship and localised case studies of the history of reading to trace broad geographical patterns of literacy in early modern Britain and Ireland. Accentuating areas of scholarly consensus while also highlighting opportunities for future research, this section concluded that literacy levels were higher in urban rather than rural areas, particularly in the regions of England, lowland Scotland, and parts of Ireland and Wales. Of course, literacy was not simply a consequence of

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readers and readerships 121 geography alone; as we have seen, an individual’s likelihood of being able to read was impacted by interconnected factors including their gender and socio-­economic status. Thus, in emerging urban centres, there was a commercial necessity to be able to read and draw up basic accounts, whereas for the rural and labouring classes, schooling beyond rudimentary literacy might serve as an expensive distraction from more essential tasks. Scholarly understandings of female literacy are more complex: while it is broadly accepted that women were less likely to be able to write than their male counterparts, more recent research indicates that girls from the burgeoning middle and upper classes were likely to have received an education, either for practical commercial reasons or to enhance their prospects of marriage. Even so, such an education would have been very different to that received by their male counterparts. However, while broad conclusions such as these can be helpful, it is important that scholars recognise the social, religious and political complexity of early modern Britain and Ireland and its implications for interpreting the history of reading, particularly the impact that British imperial objectives had upon non-­English-­speaking communities in Wales, Scotland and Ireland. What each of the studies of early modern literacy have in common (with the exception of Jenkins’s study of Wales) is that they focus on reading in English. However, as we have seen, those resident in the Scottish Highlands, rural Ireland and rural Wales primarily spoke in Celtic languages. As such, these communities faced two barriers to learning to read: the lack of a commercial and economic necessity to be able to read and a distinct lack of Celtic-­language reading material from which to learn. Closely connected to imperial expansion was the spread of Protestantism, which placed particular emphasis on the understanding of the written word. With Protestantism more common in those urban, anglicised towns of England, Scotland, Wales and the north of Ireland, this may also have contributed to the uneven distribution of literacy. To conclude, there is much more work to be done in order to fully understand the spread of ­literacy – ­or the reasons for the lack ­thereof – ­among Celtic communities. Having established broad patterns of literacy in early modern Britain and Ireland, and a firmer understanding of who the early modern reader might have been, the second part of this chapter turned to consider those who consumed printed material in more structured associational groups or ‘readerships’. With a slightly later chronological focus than the earlier part of the ­chapter – ­post-­1695 and the lapse of the Licensing ­Act – ­this section explored four of the main types of

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institutions in which early modern readerships might have engaged with and consumed printed news in its various forms; namely, taverns and inns, coffee houses, subscription libraries and newsrooms. Drawing upon recent scholarship and contemporary descriptions, this section explored each space in turn to consider the socio-­economic backgrounds of those who frequented them, as well as asking how news was read and discussed in these places. Despite noting significant differences between each type of ­institution – ­including their clientele, exclusivity and perceived ­politeness – ­this section highlighted their crucial shared features as places in which news was freely read and discussed. The following case study of eighteenth-­century Liverpool illustrates how such spaces coexisted and performed distinct, but complementary, functions in one contemporary northern town. To conclude, while this chapter has highlighted areas deserving of further scholarly investigation, it has synthesised current scholarship to map out broad geographical, socio-­economic and gendered patterns of literacy in the early modern British Isles. Furthermore, it has considered the places and spaces in which individuals might convene to read and interpret printed news. In doing so, it aims to improve our understanding of those who read and consumed newspapers and ­periodicals – ­either as individuals or in more formal ­readerships – i­ n early modern Britain and Ireland between c. 1640 and 1800.

Case Study 2: Readerships in Eighteenth-century Liverpool Sophie H. Jones Liverpoole is one of the Wonders of Britain . . . I am told, that it still visibly increases both in Wealth, People, Business and Buildings: What it may grow to in time, I know not. (Defoe 1727: 200) In the third volume of his Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain, Daniel Defoe marvelled at Liverpool’s rapid expansion. Visiting Liverpool on three separate occasions over a period of forty-­four years, Defoe expressed his ‘surpriz[e]’ at Liverpool’s urban expansion, noting that ‘the ­View . . . ­was more than double what it was at the second [visit]’ (1727: 200). Defoe’s surprise was well justified: although Liverpool’s royal charter was granted in 1207, the town experienced very little growth during the following half-­millennium. However, beginning in the late seventeenth century and lasting into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Liverpool experienced significant economic and social change, mostly as a consequence of the construction of the world’s first enclosed commercial wet dock in 1715, which revolutionised shipping

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case study 2 : liverpool readerships 123 operations in and out of the Mersey, eventually establishing Liverpool as Britain’s second city of Empire (Belchem 2006: 3–30). With economic growth came an accompanying growth in culture. As John Stobart et al. note, eighteenth-­century commercial towns such as Liverpool were seen as ‘centres of vulgar new money with only a thin veneer of politeness’ (Stobart, Hann and Morgan 2013: 8). Too engrossed with trade, such developing towns were criticised by contemporaries for their failure to engage with ‘higher things’, including science, knowledge and the arts. Liverpool was no exception, and was self-­consciously aware of its shortcomings: local commentator James Wallace, in reference to Liverpool’s ‘encouragement of science, the accommodation of the literati, and promotion of genius’, described the town as ‘nothing but a wild barren waste’ (1796: 170–2). In response to such criticisms, during the eighteenth century Liverpool engaged with many of the venues of polite sociability discussed in this chapter, including coffee houses, subscription libraries and newsrooms. Liverpool was also home to at least four newspaper titles during our period: the Liverpool Courant (1712–unknown), Williamson’s Liverpool Advertiser (later Billinge’s Liverpool Advertiser) (1756– 93), the Liverpool Chronicle (1757–67) and the Liverpool General Advertiser (1765–1876). Due to its variety of local papers and the spaces in which they were read, Liverpool provides an excellent example for a focused case study of reading printed news in the eighteenth-­century British Isles. According to William Moss’s 1799 Liverpool Guide, Liverpool’s residents had access to at least four coffee houses in which they might access printed news. The first was the ‘Coffee-­Room’, housed in ‘the Hotel’ located at the end of Lord Street. Described by Moss as being ‘neat and roomy’, the coffee room was ‘supplied with most of the London and provincial newspapers’, as well as magazines and reviews (Moss 1799: 101). Like the coffee houses considered elsewhere in this chapter, the coffee room was both public and private: although it was funded by 300 annual subscribers, who paid a guinea and a half each, the coffee room was also accessible to non-­subscribers, with Moss noting that ‘Strangers have the free privilege of the room’. For this reason, Moss claims that the coffee room was often overcrowded, particularly in the evenings (1799: 101). Despite its name, coffee was not actually served in the coffee room but in the adjoining tavern, thus arguably making the coffee room at the Lord Street Hotel akin to the newsrooms considered elsewhere (Moss 1799: 102). Liverpool’s second coffee house could be found close to the Exchange, in Exchange Alley. In contrast to the coffee room at the ­Hotel – ­which Moss described as ‘very close, often offensively so; seemingly for want of attention to ventilation’ – the Exchange coffee room was ‘very neat, airy, and comfortable’ (1799: 102). Like the Hotel coffee room, the coffee room at the Exchange supplied patrons with an assortment of newspapers. Similarly, the

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Exchange coffee room was also maintained by subscribers (although these were of fewer number than at the Hotel), with the premises being accessible to non-­subscribers, described as ‘strangers’. In contrast to the Hotel coffee room, coffee (and other unspecified beverages) was available in the Exchange coffee room, which was attended by a waiter for the purpose (Moss 1799: 102). Liverpool’s third coffee house was the Merchant’s Coffee-­House, located in the Church Yard at St Nicholas’s. Although Moss describes it as being ‘much smaller than the others’, its proximity to the Liverpool waterfront and its views of the River Mersey appealed to its patrons, as it was ‘conveniently situated for attending to the movements of the shipping’ (1799: 102). Little more is said of the Merchant’s Coffee-­House, beyond it being a place ‘where the newspapers are read’ (Moss 1799: 65). However, in contrast to the other coffee houses considered thus far, Moss indicates that lodgings were available at the Merchant’s (1799: 65). The fourth coffee house was that of the Athenaeum, which was combined with the newsroom at the same institution; it will be considered shortly. The three premises considered above provide specific examples of the early modern coffee houses that this chapter has considered. As we can see, there are key similarities and differences between them: the Exchange coffee room and the Hotel coffee room were simultaneously public and private spaces, maintained by regular subscribers but also open to visitors. There were also clear differences in clientele, with m ­ erchants – ­to whom Liverpool’s maritime connections were ­crucial – ­preferring to frequent the coffee house that had views of Liverpool’s dock and the Mersey. Some were strictly coffee houses, where coffee and other popular contemporary beverages were available, while ­others – ­such as the Hotel coffee ­room – ­did not serve coffee at all, but functioned in a similar way to a newsroom. For the purposes of our study, the key similarity which all of Liverpool’s coffee houses shared is that they provided patrons with access to printed news in the form of the London papers, provincial papers, magazines and reviews. Within these (sometimes confined) public spaces, early modern readers engaged with printed news and information. A second place in which Liverpool’s eighteenth-­century inhabitants might congregate to read printed news was the subscription library. These were voluntary associations, which were jointly owned by shareholders and maintained by the payment of annual subscriptions. Initially a North American innovation, Liverpool was the site of the first subscription library in England, founded in 1758. Liverpool’s burgeoning middle classes had expressed their desire to ‘promote the Advantage of Knowledge’ (quoted in Flavel 1985: 2). As they explained, access to printed texts was vital to improving the town’s collective education, as ‘many Kinds of useful and polite Knowledge can no otherwise be acquired than by Reading’. By pooling their collective financial resources to purchase b ­ ooks – r­ather than each member trying to assemble

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Figure 4.1  Liverpool Lyceum Building, 1828 (Creative Commons Licence, courtesy of Wikimedia) their own individual l­ibrary – ­subscribers to the library had access to a larger quantity of books, of which they were joint owners. The Liverpool Library did not enjoy its own purpose-­ built premises until 1802, when it was moved to the Lyceum, located on Bold Street. Throughout the eighteenth century the Liverpool Library was housed in a range of institutions (including a coffee house and a hotel) before settling in Lord Street during the 1780s and 1790s (Liverpool Library 1787: iii; Moss 1799: 109; Allan 2008a: 54). By 1787 the cost of a new membership was six guineas, with an annual subscription of six shillings to be paid on the first of May each year (Liverpool Library 1787: iv). These payments were used to hire and furnish suitable premises, to purchase books and to pay the librarian’s salary. Like other similar subscription libraries of the period, the quotidian operations of the Liverpool Library were performed by an elected committee drawn from among the members; in this case, there were twenty-­four committeemen, a president and a vice-­president (Liverpool Library 1787: v). In Moss’s brief description of the library, he noted that it ‘contains many valuable books for the use of the proprietors’. However, as we have seen with several other institutions, the library was also accessible (for reference purposes only) to prospective members and non-­subscribers, with Moss noting that ‘It may be viewed, and any book examined upon the spot by a stranger’ (1799: 109). Beyond access to books, library members also had access to newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets and reviews. Recorded under the subject heading

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of ‘Language, Grammar, Rhetoric, Criticism, and Logic’ the library’s 1787 catalogue lists multiple volumes of the Critical Review, English Review, London Review and Monthly Review, dating from as early as 1749. Meanwhile, listed under ‘Polite Literature’, titles included Town and Country Magazine, the Mirror and the Spectator. Thus, the members of the Liverpool Library, who formed a self-­selecting group of readers (or a ‘readership’), had access to a clearly defined corpus of texts. Whether these were read collectively or aloud, in the manner described elsewhere in this chapter, is unclear; contemporary descriptions of the library do not explicitly say. However, we can assume from diary evidence that the members had access to a common body of knowledge, which may have been discussed in social settings beyond the confines of the library: Liverpool resident Hannah Lightbody (later Hannah Greg of Quarry Bank Mill), for instance, recounted in her diary a meeting of the ‘Octonian Society’ – a group who met to discuss contemporary literary and philosophical ­topics – ­taking place in her family home, and later at the home of William Roscoe (Lightbody 2008: 5, 9). Thus, the types of texts that were held at the Liverpool Library fuelled energetic conversations which occurred elsewhere. Indeed, Lightbody held the Octonian Society in such high regard that she claimed that she ‘would rather bring a young person to spend an evening in the Company [of the Octonian Society] than give them a whole year’s common School education’ (Lightbody 2008: 9). Finally, let us turn to consider the Liverpool Athenaeum. Founded in 1797 in response to the perceived shortcomings of the older Liverpool Library, the Athenaeum comprised elements of a library, newsroom and coffee house. As its founders explained: The present public ­Library . . . ­is not sufficiently select in the choice of books; the books in it are almost exclusively confined to our own language; and the number of subscribers is now so large, that it is extremely difficult to obtain, in any reasonable time, the perusal of any new publication. (Carrick and Ashton 1997: 45) Furthermore, the Athenaeum’s founders were dissatisfied with the existing library’s opening hours, arguing that the four hours per day during which the library was open were ‘hours of business and employment’, thus making it inaccessible to Liverpool’s merchants and professionals. As we have stated, unlike the library and coffee houses which were accessible to both members and non-­members, the Athenaeum was for the exclusive use of its proprietors. The Athenaeum’s proprietors were limited to 250 individuals, each paying an entrance fee of ten guineas and an annual subscription of two guineas. As Moss notes, non-­members might only attend if they were ‘introduced, at each admission, by a proprietor’ (1799: 102–3).

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case study 2 : liverpool readerships 127 In a further contrast to the Liverpool Library, the purpose of the Athenaeum from its inception was to combine the library with ‘all the advantages and conveniences of a News-­Room’ (Carrick and Ashton 1997: 45). Housed in a purpose-­built building on Church Street, the Athenaeum supplied its proprietors with ‘a regular supply of News-­Papers, both town and country, all the periodical publications of any value, and all pamphlets that have a reference to subjects of local or general polity, or of commerce’ (Carrick and Ashton 1997: 45). The newsroom was to be fitted up as a coffee r­ oom – t­hus further blurring the distinction between coffee houses, libraries and ­newsrooms – ­in which the ‘periodical Publications, as Reviews, Magazines, &c, w ­ ill . . . ­remain in the room for the perusal of the subscribers’. Thus, the Athenaeum newsroom was, by design, a space in which proprietors might engage with printed news at their leisure, in the company of others. Indeed, evidence from the minute book of the Athenaeum’s committee indicates that, on occasion, proprietors ‘engaged’ with printed news in ways of which the committee did not approve. In October 1804 Lieutenant Colonel Maxwell made a formal complaint to the committee that he had been defamed in the margins of the Globe newspaper, as an anonymous proprietor had added the words ‘A falsehood’ to a letter in the newspaper that had been signed by Maxwell. On this occasion the matter was resolved by the Athenaeum’s president adding his own remark in the margins and pledging to discover and punish the culprit (Brazendale and Towsey 2020: 192–3). Evidence indicates that the Athenaeum newsroom was a site of several altercations: at the murder trial of proprietor William Sparling, his co-­proprietor Edward Grayson (the deceased) was accused of ‘frequently abus[ing]’ and ‘threaten[ing] to chastise’ Sparling both inside the newsroom and on the building’s public steps (Anon. 1804: 24–5). Stephens notes that northern towns were among the most literate places in eighteenth-­century England (1990: 557). As a rapidly developing northern provincial town, eighteenth-­century Liverpool has provided us with numerous illustrative examples of the range of places and institutions in which growing groups of readers could access and engage with printed news. Contemporary descriptions help to bring these spaces to life: through Moss’s detailed accounts, we can almost feel the overcrowded and oppressive atmosphere of the Hotel’s coffee room on Lord Street; picture the local merchants observing the movement of the ships as they browsed the newspapers at the dockside coffee house; or the wealthy merchants and professionals who met in the Athenaeum’s exclusive newsroom (after business hours) to consult the day’s papers over a coffee, away from the gaze and noise of ‘strangers’. As was true of many urban towns in the British Isles, where there were multiple places in which an individual might access printed news, there was a clear hierarchy to these spaces. In Liverpool, this hierarchy ranged from the bustling and overcrowded coffee rooms to the proprietors-­only newsroom of

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the Athenaeum. Despite the differences between these spaces, including the socio-­economic status of those who patronised them, each were places in which readers might freely access the eighteenth-­century ­press – ­newspapers, periodicals, magazines, r­eviews – ­and discuss their contents.

Acknowledgements The author is grateful for feedback received on earlier versions of this chapter from colleagues at the University of Liverpool. She also thanks Lucy Moynihan, student intern on the Libraries, Reading Communities and Cultural Formation in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic project, for her research on the murder of Edward Grayson and for bringing the trial documentation to the author’s attention.

Chapter Five

FROM NEWS WRITERS TO JOURNALISTS: AN EMERGING PROFESSION? Martin Conboy Introduction Who wrote the news? What sort of person committed to regular publication on contemporary events? A committed believer in a cause? A servant to democracy? A hired pen? Geopolitically, the exchange of personnel and publications between the centres of Edinburgh, Dublin and London provided a showcase for the talents of a variety of writers who would shape the practice of journalism as well as building expectations among readers of various stylistic approaches to informing a public. During the period covered by this chapter, we move from absolute censorship, through a period during the Civil War of almost anarchic if still dangerous liberty, back through a period of strict licensing and control, to the emergence of a press without pre-­ publication censorship. Persecution post-­publication was nevertheless still in evidence as the crystallisation of roles within periodicals began to shape the contours of modern journalism: foreign correspondents, editors, reviewers, cultural commentators and dedicated political reporters. The eighteenth century saw the first flowering of the review style of journalism in the work of Swift, Addison and Steele, as well as the very different, politically engaged interventions of the Jacobite Nathaniel Mist or the anonymous tradition of political commentary by letter in the case of Cato, while Johnson further developed a learned, aphoristic cultural commentary in the mid-­century. In terms of timing, full-­time professional writers specialising in news moved from weekly contributions towards more regular columns on daily newspapers towards the century’s end. The generic variety of these writers, from ‘hacks’ to professionals, from scurrilous outsiders to pillars of the commercial establishment, demonstrates the contradictory beginnings of the 129

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figure of the journalist, which continue to shape the long-­term content and expectations of the genre. Moreover, each writerly variation attempted, in effect, an experiment with the tolerance or expectations of audience.

Varieties of Public Address It has often been observed that the plethora of labels attempting to identify the work of early news writers was indicative of the complexity as well as the novelty of their undertaking. Working within extraordinarily challenging political circumstances, facing censorship, fines and physical punishment, they were nevertheless embarked on an expanding and profitable commercial enterprise. Harold Herd lists some of these names: ‘authors, epistle-­ writer, pamphleteers, writers, intelligencers, spies, correspondents, curranters, mercurists, newsmen, newsmongers, diurnalists, gazeteers, journalists’. Their publications drew on just as rich a semantic palette: ‘Courant, Intelligencer, Newes, Mercury, Post, Gazette, Relation, True Diurnal, Passages, Account, Proceedings, Occurences’ (Herd 1952: 12). Often the function of the titles of these publications was to differentiate the content of newspapers from single-­sheet propaganda, opinionated tracts or scandal sheets. At the start of the seventeenth century news was more likely to emerge as a translation from overseas publications. Such news often flowed from areas such as the Low Countries, where censorship was more relaxed, and had accumulated across complex networks of information that preceded its formal and regular dissemination in print (Raymond and Moxham 2016). News from home was considered dangerous to the political classes and restricted to occasional pamphlets, broadsides or the integration of news about recent events in ballad form as a combination of information and entertainment. The writers of pamphlets were more often than not committed to the cause promoted by their publication and were therefore passionate in their attempts to persuade their readers of the logic of their argument. Composers of ballads, on the other hand, would relate a story but always with more of an eye on its potential for broad popular reception. Translations from the Dutch meant that the earliest English news publications had more to do with the assembling of news than original reporting. Consequently, not only were the pieces potentially lacking in consistent style but they were often random in presentation. The role of an editor was therefore of paramount importance. Thomas

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from news writers to journalists 131 Gainsford was renowned as the first editor of printed newsbooks from a syndicate of publishers including Thomas Archer, Nicholas Bourne and Nathanial Butter from 1621. He drew on his wide experience of politics, travels in Europe and his career as a soldier to prioritise and organise reports in a form that could be digested by readers. He is also credited with developing a style of address directly to his audience in editorials headed ‘Dear Reader’. These were early examples of establishing a rhetorical relationship with readers by addressing their anxieties about the times they lived in (Brownlees 2006a: 69–74). What changed the role of both publications and writers was the political and technical potential for the regular reproduction of news. In addition came the commercial necessity to frame an identifiable and consistent perspective to this news, an imperative that meant that periodicals became aligned with particular political positions. Publications began to be expected at regular intervals, most often weekly, monthly or later in the eighteenth century, thrice weekly in order to mesh with the postal services throughout the country. The idea of ‘periodicity’ has been proposed as an inevitable outcome of commercial news production. Writers needed to be able to produce news about events in the world to an expected timetable, otherwise the assets of printers would lie idle waiting for something of note. As such it was a means of holding property in information (Sommerville 1996: 4). Periodicity demanded a more proactive approach to finding news and printing regular bulletins. Fixed titles with relatively stable identities that writers had to conform to that reflected these complex commercial demands were first apparent from the political turmoil that crystallised in the English Civil War (1642–51) and continued to an extent throughout the Interregnum (1649–60).

The Civil War: Writing the Conflict Samuel Pecke, a scrivener who had previously made a living copying out newsbook material for wealthy subscribers, shifted to editing his own journal in 1643: A Perfect Diurnall of the Passages in Parliament. Keen to avoid any repetition of an early experience of imprisonment for his publishing, he developed a proud reputation as an excellent anticipator of news as well as pragmatism in subtly shifting with public or official opinion (Frank 1961: 52). In his publication he took the opportunity to provide his own editorial asides and interpretations of conflicting accounts, while to further accentuate its credibility he compiled an impressive assortment of correspondents across the British Isles and beyond.

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John Dillingham is another fine illustration of how the chaotic circumstances of this world-­turned-­upside-­down permitted ambitious characters to enter the world as professional writers. He had been a tailor, and was tempted by the offer to work compiling newsletters for his patron Lord Montague from 1639 (Frank 1961). He began to edit and write his own weekly news publication from 1643, the Parliamentary Scout, and in doing so he demonstrated how ‘the professional man of l­etters – a­ category that contains the h ­ ack – ­largely replaced the dilettante’ (Frank 1961: 272–3). From the end of the sixteenth century in England, renewed interest had already emerged in the art of abbreviated writing systems first developed in the Roman Empire. Rediscovering such techniques, Thomas Shelton had established a widely used version of shorthand by the middle of the seventeenth century. His book Short-Writing was published in 1632 (Henderson 2005: 375–82) and his system was frequently employed by reporters keen to deflect criticism when giving accounts of important speeches by politicians in the Civil War and Interregnum period and, more positively, to boost claims to authenticity as having been composed in situ (Mendle 2001: 63). Editors such as Pecke took great pains to compare various reported versions to avoid compromising claims to fair and accurate representation. In marked contrast to this fastidious approach, there were writers who preferred partisan productions and, more to the point, could be better appreciated by their readers in these conflicted times. The writers who emerged out of this frenzied period were, in the main, self-­taught publicists, and they developed their style pragmatically to match their partisanship and bolster their profits, orchestrating a vernacular approach for eager audiences. It has been observed that in these publications many modern techniques of political journalism put in an appearance, such as the planted item, the inadequately denied rumour or the inside story (Frank 1961: 48). The circumstances of the Civil War meant that political rivalry in print was not only in evidence from the start but was a structural feature of the publications. The initial battle of the ‘mercuries’ that espoused such diametrical political positions was launched in 1643 between the parliamentarian Mercurius Britanicus and the royalist Mercurius Aulicus. Marchamont Nedham as author and editor of Britanicus was imprisoned for two weeks in 1646 for a scurrilous libel against the king, but bailed after two weeks on the promise of good behaviour while still banned from publishing. His communicative skills were nevertheless in great demand, and it was no less a figure than the king himself who commissioned him to produce the

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from news writers to journalists 133 aptly named Mercurius Pragmaticus from 1647. By the time of the Commonwealth, and after a further brief period in prison, this consummate professional writer, driven by the exigencies of the political world, was editing and writing most of the content of Mercurius Politicus, adapting the news to fit his presentational style and pragmatic politics at the same time as drawing on correspondents from Scotland, Ireland and mainland Europe. Increasingly, in order to demonstrate that readers do not survive on politics alone, periodical publications began to include miscellaneous news items, featuring crime and human interest, with adultery and elite scandal always ­popular – ­if risky in the case of the ­latter – ­as well as commercial inserts, poetry, news from abroad, shipping news and, in the era of the almanac, astrology. The scurrilous side of entertaining, politically targeted invective was in evidence in the work of royalist supporter John Crouch and his scatological Mercurius Fumigosus (1654) and his early venture in scandal-­mongering The Man in the Moon (1649), whose eponymous observer went walking at night and related what he saw on his nocturnal rounds: ‘smutty stories, scatological rhymes and salacious gossip’ (McElligott 2004a: 139). Outside London, periodical writers and publishers had a significant political impact. Jason Peacey (2017a) writes of the mutual influence across the Scottish–English border exerted by pamphlets imported to Scotland as well as Scottish texts exported to England at the time of the Civil War as having a profound and complex effect on the state of Anglo-­Scottish relations and in building a sense of a broader British community. Some early newspapers and other propaganda pamphlets proclaimed on a variety of religious, political and cultural matters, but principally printers linked Presbyterian communities in England and Scotland; for example, the Scotch Counsellor (London, 1643), which was framed as correspondence between friends. More occasional news pamphlets served as warnings about the dangers of military incursions, such as Robert Bostock’s The Readinesse of the Scots to Advance into England (1643). Described as the first Scottish newspaper, the Scotish Dove (1643–46) was a supporter of Anglo-­ Scottish union. Although its editor, George Smith, was English and it emerged from the London press of Laurence Chapman, his ‘dove’ was a metaphor for the transmission of peaceful cooperation between the two states. Throughout the Civil War, news-­sheets informing the population were published out of Waterford, Kilkenny and Cork. Pecke’s The Heads of Severall Proceedings in This Present Parliament among others provided regular updates on news from Ireland, including reports of atrocities and the implications of Catholic plots, while it

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used regular correspondents rather than sources on the ground. By 1649, and Cromwell’s brutal suppression of Irish rebellion, news from Ireland was an extremely hot property and made possible the publication in Cork of the Irish Mercury and the Irish Monthly Mercury, also reprinted in London in 1650.

Women as Writers and Audience Attitudes towards women writers in print media, including news production, were highly gendered, not to say misogynistic (Nevitt 1999: 84). Despite this, there were early pioneers who used the disruption of the Civil War era as an opportunity to shape various causes in print. Pamphlets by Katherine Chidley, for example, drove the Puritan cause, and she later acted as a support and propagandist for Leveller John Lilburne. Despite this sort of polemic intervention, we have little evidence that women were involved in news writing apart from Elizabeth Alkin, whose efforts have remained recognised across time despite the patriarchal tendency to conceal such contributions. According to Marcus Nevitt (1999: 98) she was involved in the production of ten newsbooks, including one where she is referred to by name, the Impartial Scout (1650). Women publishers crossing the boundaries into writing became prevalent in the mid-­to-­late seventeenth century (McDowell 1998). Women were actors, producing, owning and writing news and polemical periodicals, but they were also a market to be written for. As with their male counterparts, women periodical writers were driven as much by commercial considerations as by religious or political motivation. Particularly after the Restoration of 1660, with news publications confined to official government issues, rare was the periodical writer whose main preoccupation would have been with presenting an impression of balance and accuracy in reporting the events of the world. Opinion and persuasion were their chief ambitions. Elinor James (c. 1645–1719) was an Anglican polemicist who published intermittent broadsides professing her religious convictions. Quaker Ann Docwra (1624–1710) was a writer, publisher and printer whose energies stretched to printed tracts on religious controversy including defending women’s right to prophesy in public. Another prominent Quaker was Tace Sowle (1666–1749), who was a member of the otherwise male-­dominated Stationers’ Company from 1693 and ran her family printing house for over fifty years. Her broadsides against public figures were notorious. Perhaps the most impressive character of all was Joan Whitrowe (c. 1631–1707) who encapsulated all the radical

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from news writers to journalists 135 potential of seventeenth-­century political opinion on questions such as the condition of the working poor, the excesses of the wealthy elite and even the consequences of early colonialism: She criticized the upper ranks’ excessive attention to things of the flesh, especially fine foods and apparel, and she consistently referred to the élites rather than to working people as ‘the drunkards, the feasters, the swearers, gamesters, whoremongers, the proud’ . . . Above all, she argued that the endless accumulation of capital in the hands of a few must be curbed. (McDowell 1998: 165) As journalism emerged in flux, opportunists sought new markets for publications. While women polemicists were honing their arguments, male writers and editors were dipping their pens into experiments to exploit a female readership. The first was John Dunton, who experimented with a question-­and-­answer exchange for women in his Athenian Mercury (1691) and subsequently, encouraged by its success, was emboldened to launch the first specialist women’s publication, the Ladies Mercury in 1693. Its target readership, the leisured and literate female bourgeoisie, appreciated this break into a different kind of non-­ political miscellany with an emphasis on fashion and matters of the heart. Dunton was not beyond experimenting with another approach to women, as objects of the male gaze. His Night-Walker (1696–97) was a thinly masked set of exploitative and prurient interviews with prostitutes, offering an early example of the potential that sensationalism could offer a male audience. John Tripper’s annual Ladies’ Diary (1704) contained complex mathematical, literary and astronomical puzzles that demanded extensive education in its readers. Richard Steele included material in his Tatler specifically for a female readership, adding the voice of Jenny Distaff as a porte-parole for women’s concerns. This was, however, not unproblematic and some, including Jonathan Swift, saw this as ‘fair-­sexing’ – a patronising inclusion of certain topics assumed to be of interest to women readers. Into the eighteenth century, the growth of a socially ambitious middle class launched many young women in pursuit of an education that would make them attractive to aristocratic suitors, marrying wealth with status. This class consolidation contributed much to the plurality of the idealised public sphere (Conboy 2004: 132). Periodicals aimed at this heterogeneous female readership had a broad impact: ‘More than simply setting out to popularise learning, however, women’s magazines made contributions to the debate around women’s learning itself ’ (Wood 2018: 37).

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Figure 5.1  Title page of the Athenian Mercury, 18 April 1693, with questions in italics and answers in roman type (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin)

To counteract the under-­representation of women’s contributions as authors, publishers and audiences, Batchelor and Powell have powerfully asserted their role: ‘there is no periodical culture in the English tradition without women: full stop’ (Batchelor and Powell 2018: 3). Examples of this should foreground Delarivier Manley, who adopted the nom de plume of Mrs Phoebe Crackenthorpe in the Female Tatler (1709) to provide a coarse and opinionated view of the world from a Tory perspective and, in so doing, demonstrate the potential to transform gossip about public affairs into entertaining satire. Its subtitle of

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from news writers to journalists 137 Remarks upon Events and Occurrences demonstrated its ambition to go beyond mere opinion and base itself in the hitherto male-­dominated world of news and politics. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu produced a short-­run Nonsense of Commonsense as an anti-­Tory publication between 1737 and 1738 which was notable for its commissioned news items and stock reports. Eliza Haywood’s Female Spectator (1744–46) modelled itself closely on continuing the influence of Addison and Steele’s formula with a Lady, a Widow of Quality and the Daughter of a Merchant as a representative selection, supplemented by commentary on scandal and rumour from towns and cities far and wide. After the publication of the Lady’s Museum in 1760 by Charlotte Lennox, a renowned novelist of the time, the magazine format began to dominate over the hitherto successful essay periodical amid rapidly changing attitudes to women in the public sphere (Conboy 2004: 132–4). This was compounded by the development of self-­consciously highbrow male periodicals that generated what has been called the ‘Great Forgetting’ of the eighteenth-­century woman writer at the turn of the nineteenth century (Siskin 1998: 197). On this point, Cynthia White had already observed: The eighteenth century began with an intellectual revival in which women participated but it ended with Mary Wollstonecraft’s impassioned denunciation of sexual discrimination showing that the intervening years had witnessed a marked change in social attitudes. (White 1970: 33) From 1770 the Lady’s Magazine; or, Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex set out what was to be the most successful exponent of a new digest of restricted women’s journalism. Its formula, devised by the publisher of the Gentleman’s Magazine, Edward Cave, was to provide a template for the next two centuries, comprising: a little instruction, beauty, health, cookery; some free offers such as the embroidery patterns and music sheets of songs; a good serial story, some shorter romantic tales, some charming romantic pictures; a little sentimental verse. And, of course, the answers to readers’ letters, the heart-­throb column. (Adburgham 1972: 150–1)

Structural Constraints on Periodical Writers With the Restoration and the return of strict licensing and censorship, the progress of news writing was proving to be less than linear,

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yet an identifiable template had been established and would be able to be accessed and built upon once political conditions permitted. News had established a sophisticated, if limited, reading public that appreciated its generic possibilities, while news writers were learning to produce for that textual community of political and cultural debate at a vernacular level. Writers, when increasingly referred to by descriptors such as ‘Spy’ or ‘Scout’ in the titles of certain publications, were aware that they were transgressing on to territory that was not theirs by right but that they did this to appropriate information and commentary on events for their readers. Thus, the public discourse of journalism was becoming part of its own foundational myth: its writers were discursively summoning it into existence. The curious, informed and sceptical conversations of the coffee house and tavern might have been temporarily suspended in written form, but the audience was still active in its various oral disputations and would prove ever hungry for the work of the news writers when it returned.

Writing the ‘Public Sphere’ The lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695 allowed the generic variety that had existed briefly at the time of the Restoration to once more flow towards eager audiences, while writers tried adding various permutations to make the most of the new opportunities (Conboy 2008). The ‘public sphere’ as delineated by Habermas ([1962] 1989) was an active process of construction, with conscious contributions from the audience as participants and a variety of writers bringing different styles to measure the tastes of the market. Writers such as Defoe, Swift, Steele and Addison defined the potential contours of political and social commentary on contemporary affairs for the emerging generation of full-­ time journalists from the 1740s (Conboy 2004: 60). Richard Steele was born into an affluent Protestant family in Dublin in 1672 and educated in England. After a brief period in the army where he rose to the rank of captain, he wrote some moderately successful plays and then was appointed as gazetteer, the overseer of the government publication the London Gazette (1707–10) (Applegate 2009: 177–81). He was the driving force, with Addison, behind both the Tatler (1709–11) and Spectator (1711–12), and never completely convinced by a concentration on news as a priority, he wrote early in the life of the publication: ‘we shall not upon a dearth of news, present you with musty foreign edicts, or dull proclamations’ (Tatler, 12 April 1709).

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from news writers to journalists 139 After the first 80 editions of the Tatler Steele stopped including news altogether, which has drawn the following perceptive interpretation: the difficulty in keeping news fresh and timely, in the face of much competition from the newspapers, were reasons enough for eliminating this department. Add to these the fact that the single essay type had become a favourite form with writers and readers. Richard Steele was enough of a journalist to give the public what it wanted. (Graham 1926: 68) More within Steele’s abilities were moral essays on behaviour and taste: drunkenness, gambling, violence, including duelling, were regular targets. From his experience of writing for the stage, he brought an ear for speech and set it down in a lively manner. In a nod to national variety, he stressed that his principal protagonist, Bickerstaff, was proud of his Welsh ancestry. Steele’s collaborator on much of this journalistic enterprise was Joseph Addison whom he had known from his time at school. Addison was elected to Parliament in 1708 and moved to Ireland to take up a position as secretary to the Marquess of Wharton, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland in 1709 (Applegate 2009: 7–9). It was at this point that he started contributing to the Tatler. With some success in writing poetry and literary criticism before teaming up with Steele, his elegant but straightforward style was a contrast to the classical, allusion-­rich pretensions of much contemporary learned prose. From 1711 Robert Hepburn published a Scottish version of the Tatler. Part homage and part critique, overall its intention seemed to be to provide a more robust contestation of London’s political, moral and economic hegemony (Mathison 2005: 159), based on the patterns of communication of Edinburgh’s churches, clubs, taverns and courtyards. The porte-parole was Donald MacStaff. Jonathan Swift provided a more learned style of satirical prose, often within the format of periodical publications. He was born in Ireland, studied at Trinity College Dublin and later at Oxford, and was ordained into the Church of Ireland. He moved between Ireland and England throughout his life, pursuing in tandem his religious commitments and writing career (Applegate 2009: 192–7). From 1710 Robert Harley invited him to edit the Examiner as a Tory spokespiece, yet he was more influential and certainly better remembered as a pamphleteer, a pioneering advocacy journalist and as a satirical storyteller. In keeping with the metropolitan locus of periodical publishing, Dublin was a significant centre. It pirated London periodicals liberally but also innovated with serial publications of its own, such as George

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Faulkner’s Dublin Journal from 1725 to 1825, the Hibernian Magazine which ran from 1771 to 1811, and Freeman’s Journal, first published in 1763. Edinburgh also had a thriving culture of letters and local news-­sheets alongside London imports, with increasingly dominant titles of its own appearing in the second half of the century from the publication of the Scots Magazine (1739–1826) (Batchelor and Powell 2018: 3).

The Shaping of Newspapers There is no clear lineage in the emergence of full-­time news writers. Some of the earliest publications capture much of the aspiration of the best of contemporary journalism, yet there are periods when anything approaching progress is arrested. Frustration at the suppression of all but officially sanctioned newspapers from 1660 encouraged the circulation of occasional pamphlets, private newsbooks and short-­lived periodicals, all of which allowed ambitious and courageous writers to continue to hone their craft. After the liberalisation of 1695, one of the most effective early controllers of the press was Robert Harley, whose judicious sponsorship and preferential access offered a succession of writers inside information on political affairs, but only to the extent that they secured his own ambitions. This meant that writers would normally associate with newspapers favouring their own political views, and impartial news was almost impossible to find despite protestations by the publications to the contrary. Quite simply, political access required political acquiescence. For example, the aspiration, at least, to impartiality was present in the Whig-­supporting Daily Courant from its first edition on 11 March 1702, produced incidentally by another prominent woman, Elizabeth Mallet. Reliable information combined with a lively style was better encapsulated in the most popular format of the thrice-­weekly papers, which appeared immediately after the lapse of licensing in 1695, such as the Flying Post, designed to be distributed through the regular posts. The posts allowed news to spread out on a consistent basis from the metropolis. Taverns, barber’s shops and coffee houses across the land became clearing houses for the latest information and opinion exchange. Henceforth, topicality became a prerequisite for news writers. The miscellaneous content of newspapers and the flux between political positions meant that newspapers increasingly failed to maintain any strict partisanship in political affairs, and veered more towards general political inclination. From mid-­century, pages were laid out

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from news writers to journalists 141 into clearly divided sections covering foreign news, commodity prices, theatrical reviews, advertising, the arrival of ships, police news, crime and sport, all of which required increasing levels of specialisation from writers. From the 1750s John Gurney devised a more systematised version of shorthand that could be used to reinforce the role of journalist as witness to events, thus separating the roles of correspondent from reporter, opinion from fact. The short-­lived news publication Mercurius Caledonius from 1660 survived for just ten editions, and it was not until the Edinburgh Gazette (1699) that we see anything approaching stability for a newspaper produced in Scotland. The introduction of the penny post from 1680 made distribution much cheaper, easier and because of increased volume, more difficult to police. Developments mirrored those in urban centres in England, from the Edinburgh Courant (1705) to the Glasgow Courant (1715) and the Dumfries Mercury (1721), whose reporters answered the need for regular and accurate trade news and political consideration to underscore political debate in a commercial context (Brown 2015). Writers such as David Hume, Adam Ferguson and Hugh Blair in their contributions to Scottish-­based periodicals played a significant role in driving the Scottish Enlightenment of the eighteenth century (Benchimol 2011), and enabled the establishment of Edinburgh’s reputation as a northern cultural metropolis.

Letters from Anonymous Contributors Letters had always been a staple of news publications, and their potential for anonymity offered both writer and publication a certain amount of protection from censorious administrations or litigious individuals. The letters of ‘Cato’ in the London Journal were the first to really shake the establishment, particularly in the wake of the South Sea Bubble investment catastrophe, to the extent that in 1722 Walpole bought the paper, sacked the editorial team and insisted on a line more sympathetic to the government. In fact, as de facto prime minister, Walpole created a whole range of subsidies, rewards, privileges and access to select information, to the extent that ‘author by profession’ became the subtle indicator of the degree to which what we would now call full-­time journalists had become political servants. It was in response to this development that the essay books took over in popularity from newspapers. From 1725 the Jacobite Nathaniel Mist utilised the convention of deploying classical names in his eponymous Weekly Journal to mask the vitriolic contributors. The notoriety of his publication eventually saw him flee to exile in France, whence he

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continued his efforts with Fog’s Weekly Journal. The ‘Persian letters’ in the Craftsman (1726) were also a useful conceit, criticising domestic politics while purporting to be written about some distant and exotic land. The host publication was an essay paper, organised and contributed to by Nicholas Amhurst to counter Walpole’s administration and, in particular, his attempts to suppress the oppositional press. It is said to have ‘created the expectation of an absolutely relentless opposition to overbearing authority’ (Sommerville 1996: 133). Such papers may have been politically risky, but this was outweighed by their commercial allure, since they sold in their tens of thousands specifically on account of their unrestricted political views. Advertising flowed towards them as an additional benefit. A final manifestation of this tradition came in the Public Advertiser. Despite its strong focus on advertising and its mission to act as a conduit for victims of robbery to publicise their losses as an assistance to the police, it also found room to print a variety of politically motivated letters, most notably those by ‘Junius’ in 1769 that ‘raised journalism to a far more important position than it had ever held before’ (Fox Bourne [1887] 1998: 190). The success of these letters drew further political contributors to the paper and assisted greatly in establishing it as a respectable genre of commentary as the decade grew to a close, when leading daily papers began to incorporate such pieces as routine.

Converging towards an Identity More political provocation was provided in the repeated and eventually successful attempts to report on the proceedings of Parliament. The first attempt was in the playful and contemptuous reporting on Parliament through lightly anonymised references to England as Lilliput or ancient Rome in the Gentleman’s Magazine founded in 1731. Reporters included Samuel Johnson, author of perhaps the most telling definition of the professional wordsmith in the person of the emerging figure of the journalist when he wrote: ‘no man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money’ (The Rambler, 27 March 1750). He was joined in his political reporting venture by William Guthrie, the son of a Scottish minister who arrived in London after graduating from Aberdeen University. Later in the century, John Wilkes consolidated the long struggle to cover Parliament in session in his Middlesex Journal from 1771, with the result that political reporting was permitted for the first time since the breakdown of royal authority in 1643. Towards the end of the eighteenth century increased revenue from advertising led to the creation of regular daily newspapers that could

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from news writers to journalists 143 properly support full-­ time writers. The Morning Chronicle (1770), Morning Post (1772) and Daily Universal Register (1785, later renamed The Times) were all successfully launched in this period. James Perry and Daniel Stuart on the Chronicle and Post respectively began the tradition of having total control of the operation, identity and content of their publications in a mode that would soon be formally referred to as ‘editor’. Commercial success further tipped the balance towards independence from government sources and networks of information, leading newspapers to experiment with specialist correspondents abroad. Commercial success was reinvested in the quality and layout of the papers as they sought to compete with each other, initially in the London arena but increasingly in large provincial towns. The reliance on advertising led to the convention of filling the front page with advertisements that were often better laid out than the news items within. Editors had to acknowledge that the miscellany or non-­political items had become the ‘soul of a newspaper’ (Asquith 1978: 107), which further drove the need to hire more generalist reporters. Success in their own right also liberated newspapers from broad dependence on publishers and printers. We have to wait until the early nineteenth century for the word ‘journalism’ to enter the English language from French (Campbell 2000: 40), but the description of someone as a ‘journalist’ preceded the definition of the activity itself in 1693 according to the OED. The term would not have been one chosen by many of the contributors to the publications under review here, which was of more restricted reference: “‘Journalist”, however, is not the word they themselves would have used: in the eighteenth century it was a term reserved largely for political or governmental news reporting’ (Batchelor and Powell 2018: 8). Regardless of this observation, the variety of writers, however defined, contributed to the operational range of the professional journalist over time in a sometimes uneven conflation of profit, pragmatism but also conviction in multiplying discourses on the parameters and status of their occupation (Conboy and Tang 2016).

Conclusion This brief account underlines the fact that journalism was not something that emerged as an abstract entity. It was shaped by men and women as a process of experimentation in dialogue with the state, printers and most importantly audiences hungry for news and commentary on contemporary affairs. Writers produced both high and low to satisfy the full range of interest: ‘Journalism had enabled a new

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form of social communication to become established in English urban life. It was one which blended political with wider cultural information across a range of publications and representational styles’ (Conboy 2004: 65). The period saw a shift in the editorial role from publishers driven by the challenges of space, supply of news and advertising to editors who were more professionally occupied with content and a consistent identity within the marketplace of print. In their variety rather than in any narrow concentration on the political sphere, writers contributed to scoping the breadth of social and cultural experience. It was this breadth rather than political reporting per se that allowed the emergence of the social discourse that would come to be understood as journalism. Journalists and editors become named consistently as such towards the end of this period, but they had spent the best part of two centuries managing the dangerous challenges of hostile politicians, changing economic times and fickle audiences.

Case Study 3: Daniel Defoe Martin Conboy Daniel Defoe is best known to us as the author of much early prose fiction, most notably Robinson Crusoe. For most of his own lifetime, however, he was a renowned professional writer, a hired pen at the service of political and commercial masters. To this extent, Defoe is an early exemplar of the politically positioned journalist. His output as a writer of journalism, a regular commentator on contemporary affairs for a general, paying readership, spans much of the diversity identifiable within this emergent discourse from the seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries. To this end, he wrote as a pamphleteer, a political commentator, a religious dissenter, a diarist, fictional rapporteur, a travel writer and according to one critic (Hannis 2007) as a prototypical consumer journalist. Educated at the behest of his father for the Presbyterian ministry, he chose instead to work as a merchant in London and in Scotland, with mixed fortunes ranging from success to bankruptcy. In 1701 his poem, The True-Born Englishman, a defence of William III, brought him national renown. In it, he stressed the inevitability of mixed heritage in the context of England, as riposte to those objecting to a Dutch monarch. In words that resonate down the centuries he observes: Thus from a mixture of all kinds began, That het’rogeneous thing, an Englishman

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Figure 5.2  Portrait of Daniel Defoe (Courtesy of Wellcome Collection, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0) The lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695 led to an outpouring of hitherto suppressed dissent, propaganda and polemic, while post-­publication punishments including fines, pillory, imprisonment and execution were still deployed, and certainly made public writing a precarious undertaking. Defoe had direct experience of the impact of this new regime when his pamphlet, The Shortest Way with the Dissenters; or, Proposals for the Establishment of the Church, which attacked a high-­ranking cleric, Henry Sacherevell, landed him in prison. He was released in 1703 at the behest of Robert Harley, then the speaker of the House of Commons, who, having appreciated Defoe’s polemical talents, had plans to deploy them for his own broader political purposes. This became manifest in his covert sponsorship of Defoe’s A Review of the Affaires of France (and of All Europe) which after a year was published three times weekly from 1704 to 1713. Despite the evident political nature of the project, Defoe made the traditional claims for a periodical writer in its first edition that his publication was ‘Purg’d from the Errors and Partiality of News-­Writers, and Petty-­ Statesmen’. He also provided an early experiment with reader engagement, announcing ‘AN Entertaining Part in every Sheet, BEING, ADVICE from the

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Scandal CLUB, To the Curious Enquirers: in Answer to Letters sent them for that Purpose’. Defoe’s Review initiated the periodical essay form. This comprised a single-­ themed topic in each edition ranging across a wide variety of topical issues with an identifiably pugnacious and provocative style. Well-­connected politically, yet able to antagonise politicians of either main party in his opinionated writing, he often stressed the value of real-­life experience on his writing. ‘A true bred merchant is a universal s­ cholar . . . ­His foreign exchanges, protests, and procurations speak all tongues’ (Review, 3 January 1706). From the moment Defoe became involved in writing and editing his own weekly periodical, he was almost certainly acting as a roving informant, propagandist or even spy, especially in Scotland, for the London-­based government in anticipation of the union of the crowns in 1707. Despite Harley’s resignation from government in 1708, Defoe remained in position because of the importance of his work, his general support of the Godolphin administration and his role in promoting the union with Scotland. Godolphin’s administration fell in 1710 and Harley returned to lead a Tory administration. At this stage Defoe produced bespoke pamphlets whose ideas he would have disagreed with elsewhere (Novak 2001: 587), and he had acquired the reputation of a political turncoat. When the Whigs returned to power in 1714 he became editor of the Whig Flying Post and Medley, putting himself on firmer ground as he himself almost certainly considered himself as a Whig who nevertheless occasionally needed to act out the part of a Tory for his own financial and professional benefit. With a further switch in political administration, Defoe was hired by the Whig Earl of Sunderland between April and August 1717 to write for Nathaniel Mist’s crypto-­Jacobite Weekly Journal: or, Saturday’s Post in an attempt to draw the publication away from its more libellous content (Bialuschewski 2007: 448). An anonymous contemporary critic savaged Defoe’s character and writing: He is a Man of great Rashness and Impudence, a mean mercenary Prostitute, a State Mountebank, an Hackney Tool, a scandalous Pen, a foul Mouthed Mongrel, an Author who writes for Bread, and lives by Defamation. (Anon. 1708: 7) More recent appraisals have provided a spectrum of negativity. He has been described as the ‘most chameleon-­like of writers’ (Armstrong 1996: 9) and a ‘professional liar whose work is filled with disguise, lies, indirection, forgery, deceit, and duplicity’ (Davis 1983: 155). In his defence, we could point out that for anyone, especially someone dependent for their income on political patronage, this was a time of fluctuating political fortunes. In terms of administration the polity was in flux, with seventeen elections between 1679 and

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case study 3 : daniel defoe 147 1722. There was therefore often little, beyond personal ambition, to distinguish Tory from Whig. Some have argued that we should look beyond Defoe’s journalism for a more consistent sense of personal conviction. Marshall (2007) claims that it is in his work as a ‘satirist’ that across his writing career he is most consistent, a man of conviction, revealing a strong and pervasive insistence on his own Protestant faith away from the shifting sands of political preference or economic fashion, in which morality and manners are a constant theme. As a writer, Defoe does not come from the school of journalism as reporting facts about the world, more from a tradition that sees journalism as a reflection upon and intervention into the state of things. In effect, he was what Jean Chalaby (1998) has termed a publicist, not to be confused with the later iteration of journalist as a reporter driven chiefly by ethical concerns for objectivity and fact-­based reportage. Since, in fact, he often wrote on the road, he had to improvise ‘evidence’ from anecdote and sometimes embroidered on his own. Moreover, he frequently wrote with great self-­awareness about the role of the journalist and the public nature of writing. Never was this more apparent than in his appropriating a suitable guise for the fluctuating stances in his writing in The Consolidator; or, Memoirs of Sundry Transactions from the World in the Moon (1705), in which Defoe created for himself as narrator in the pages of an ingenious satirical fiction the figure of a lunar traveller who viewed political events on earth from a dispassionate distance through a perspective glass; a forerunner of the objective journalist reporting on events and giving opinions through changing times. Writing for him was a trade; the experience needed to be a good writer was not in his view that of the classical scholar. Swift considered him ‘illiterate’ because of his lack of classical allusion (The Examiner, 16 November 1710). Although Curtis (1993: 293–319) has demonstrated the versatility and rhetorical range in his non-­journalistic writing, Defoe’s prose style is best identified in the ‘plain-­spoken, down-­to-­earth, unpedantic and colloquial style of the Review’ (Sutherland 1971: 74), which brings it very much into line with the vernacular tendencies of journalism in its generalist appeal. In terms of this plain style, we can do no better than cite Defoe’s own ambitions concerning his writing: If any man was to ask me, what I would suppose to be a perfect style or language, I would answer, that in which a man speaking to five hundred people, of all common and various capacities, idiots and lunaticks excepted, should be understood by them all, in the same manner with one another, and in the same sense which the speaker intended to be understood, this would certainly be a most perfect style. (Defoe [1725] 2007: 33)

Chapter Six

FROM MANUSCRIPT TO PRINT: THE MULTIMEDIA NEWS SYSTEM Rachael Scarborough King

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n the tatler of 17 september 1709 , Richard Steele noted that, in the wake of the allied forces’ victory at the battle of Malplaquet during the War of the Spanish Succession, ‘People now spend their Time in Coffee-­houses in Reflections upon the Particulars of the late glorious Day, and collecting the several Parts of the Action, as they are produc’d in Letters from private Hands, or Notices given to us by Accounts in publick Papers’ (Steele 1987, I: 41). The news, as Steele represents it, arrives and circulates in multiple media: oral conversation, handwritten letters and printed papers. His own work, he jokily complained, was being neglected as the public fixated on military news. Even an influential print periodical such as the Tatler, which scholars such as Jürgen Habermas have positioned as foundational to the print public sphere, represented itself as immersed in a news ecosystem in which speech and manuscript remained principal media more than 250 years after the invention of printing (Habermas [1962] 1989: 43). Histories of the development and spread of the newspaper in Britain have often had an implicitly (or explicitly) Whiggish orientation, with the progressive rise of print sweeping away supposedly outdated, inefficient manuscript and oral forms of news transmission along with government restrictions on news circulation. In particular, the establishment of the London Gazette in 1665 has been taken as a foundational event, as the newspaper exhibited the folio half-­sheet, two-­column format that would remain standard for newspapers well into the eighteenth century, and that remains visually familiar today. For example, James Sutherland writes that the Gazette was a ‘complete innovation, replacing the traditional format of the newsbook with a half sheet in folio: a two-­page newspaper, set for the first time 148

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from manuscript to print 149 in double columns, and costing 1d.’ (Sutherland 1986: 11). Although printed corantos and newsbooks had circulated since the 1620s, with frequent, heated publications during the Civil War period, the government-­sponsored Gazette was the first paper to join the broadsheet format to strict periodicity, initially appearing bi-­ weekly on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Even though the early Gazette was much smaller than today’s broadsheet n ­ ewspaper – a­ bout the same size as a sheet of A4 ­paper – i­t had the recognisable look of a newspaper, with a standard banner heading, datelines and columns. This format’s continued predominance in newspapers today makes the Gazette appear as the inaugurator of a generic legacy. A numerical view of the newspaper across the eighteenth century also seems to support the idea of an inexorable spread of printed news. Before ­1695 – w ­ hen the Licensing Act, which imposed pre-­publication censorship and restricted printing to London, Oxford and Cambridge, ­lapsed – t­ here were no newspapers outside London, but by 1705 there were a handful and by 1800 there were more than seventy (Barker 2000: 29). While the Gazette was, for the most part, the only London paper until 1685, there were twelve London papers in 1712 and twenty-­ three by 1790, comprising fourteen daily papers, seven tri-­weeklies and two weeklies (Barker 2000: 29–30). Three long-­running newspapers, the Post Boy, the Post Man and the Flying Post, launched within months of the lapse of the Licensing Act (Marshall 2020: 18). Hannah Barker, in a vein similar to other newspaper historians, describes the fall of licensing as ‘a watershed in newspaper history’ that provided printers with ‘unprecedented freedom’, although she notes that this was only apparent in ­hindsight – p ­ arliamentarians did not intend to sponsor a free press when they failed to renew the Act (Barker 2000: 1, 15). In this way, the link between printing and newspapers has been seen as almost causal, with loosened restrictions on printing spurring newspaper production. However, as Steele’s description in the Tatler of the eighteenth-­ century news landscape illuminates, printed news begins to look less unique when it is put in the context of other written forms of news ­transmission – ­in particular, manuscript newsletters. Manuscript and printed news sources remained intertwined into the eighteenth century, with professionally produced, periodically scheduled newsletters remaining central elements of the British and Irish news network until at least the 1720s. Even after that period, newspapers continued to rely on personal letters, paid correspondents and diplomatic dispatches as sources of news, as professional reporters writing under their own bylines did not become common until the Victorian period (Pettegree

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2014: 312). Ian Atherton argues that ‘Manuscript was the more important form of written news until the early eighteenth century: it was more plentiful than printed news; it was more accurate, less censored, and regarded as more authoritative’ (Atherton 1999b: 40). Newspapers and newsletters overlapped in both form and content, and eighteenth-­century readers did not perceive a radical break between the two; rather, the media were understood as in constant conversation with one another, as well as with other news sources such as pamphlets, diplomatic correspondence and coffee house conversation. Although scholars have often assumed that the purpose of manuscript newsletters was to avoid the surveillance that faced print publications, their persistence cannot be entirely attributed to censorship regulations. Both manuscript and printed productions were subject to oversight, and the information in the papers often overlapped. Rather than replacing newsletters, printed newspapers joined and augmented existing modes of news transmission. Written and printed news media interacted in complex ways, both drawing from and competing with each another. They shared features in terms of format, layout, method of circulation and content. This chapter will focus initially on the close connection between manuscript and printed news until about 1715, showing how both media represented a transnational European news environment rather than a local one, and how correspondence networks provided the basis for news circulation. The final section will then detail the decline of the professional manuscript newsletter in the second half of the eighteenth century, while continuing to show how central letter writing was to news production and consumption. A clearer understanding of the prominence of manuscript news throughout the foundational period for the eighteenth-­ century newspaper elucidates the practicalities of news transmission and shows how writers and readers developed methods for authenticating news items. The interaction between newsletters and newspapers demonstrates that the eighteenth century constituted a multimedia news environment rather than one in which print was the dominant medium of exchange.

Epistolary Form in Newsletters and Newspapers The London Gazette’s two-­ column half-­ sheet folio format appears original in comparison to the dominant printed news genre of the Civil War period: the newsbook. The Gazette’s material qualities led Charles E. Clark to argue that ‘The great contribution of the London Gazette to newspaper history as a whole was really its form rather than

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from manuscript to print 151 its function: its leap to what we recognize even today as the newspaper format’ (Clark 1994: 26). Newsbooks were, as the name implies, multi-­ page ­books – u ­ sually eight pages ­quarto – t­ hat ran serially if not strictly periodically (Raymond 1996: 13). They featured title pages or half-­ pages rather than banner headers and, although they began as miscellaneous collections of domestic news, they ‘soon transformed from a plain and non-­controversial narration of parliamentary proceedings into a bitter and aggressive instrument of literary and political faction’ (Raymond 1996: 13). But while the Gazette broke from the format of the newsbooks, it took its cues from other media. The French-­language Gazette d’Amsterdam, which circulated internationally, predated the London Gazette and also used the banner headline, half-­folio, two-­ column format. Simon Burrows describes the ‘gazette form’ as a news-­ sheet that ‘appeared twice-­weekly, and provided readers with news bulletins and official texts (such as relations, laws, ordinances, peace treaties and remonstrances), usually without comment, in a set order, under the putative place and dateline of the report’s origin’ (Burrows 2002: 24). The Gazette adopted a particular visual appearance that remains with us today. The Gazette d’Amsterdam was clearly an influence, but the London Gazette also drew from the format of manuscript newsletters in its shift away from the newsbook form. Like the Gazette, many newsletters comprised a single half-­folio sheet written on both sides or a bifolium with three pages of text (see Figure 6.1). Unlike personal letters, they tended to lack individualised superscriptions, beginning either with a dateline such as ‘London’ or ‘Whitehall’ or with a generalised ‘Sir’. Like newspapers, they typically featured white space with a heading at the top of page one, and they divided news into paragraphs assigned to a place and/or date. Newsletters’ and newspapers’ formal similarities allowed them to be folded up and mailed together, a practice that is evident in the reverse-­image impressions of inky type left behind on many handwritten sheets. Newspapers would have appeared visually familiar to readers already accustomed to manuscript newsletters. The first editor of the Gazette, Henry Muddiman, moved back and forth between manuscript and printed news publications throughout his career. Beginning in 1659, Muddiman began publishing the newsbooks the Parliamentary Intelligencer and Mercurius Publicus, and in 1660 began circulating a newsletter. That year he was named the state’s official journalist, and in 1665 the Under-­Secretary of State Joseph Williamson made him the first editor of the Gazette, which was initially located in Oxford with the plague-­exiled Court (Sommerville 1996: 58; Handover 1965: 7). He held this position for less than six months, but

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Figure 6.1  Typical eighteenth-century newsletter using the bifolium format with white space and banner heading at the top of the first page, 26 January 1710 (Manuscript Newsletters from London, 1689–1710, Huntington Library, mssHM 30659, f. 115)

after being replaced as editor in 1666 by Charles Perrot he continued his newsletter service, which was considered more factual and interesting than Williamson’s competing, official one (Muddiman 1923: 195). He retained a state monopoly on commercial manuscript news until the end of 1687 (Muddiman 1923: 245). Muddiman’s career heading both manuscript and print publications, and his use of the same format for his newsletters and the Gazette, exemplifies the continual circulation of news between media. Thus, while James Sutherland writes that the Gazette was a ‘complete innovation, replacing the traditional format of the newsbook with a half sheet in folio’ (Sutherland 1986: 11), in fact it was more of a remediation: shifting the format of the newsletter into print. In Remediation: Understanding New Media, David Jay Bolter and Richard Grusin write that the introduction of a new medium tends to engender both immediacy and hypermediacy, the former revealing an attempt to

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from manuscript to print 153 disguise media shift and the latter to highlight it (Bolter and Grusin 2000: 5). As they write, new media ‘oscillate between immediacy and hypermediacy, between transparency and opacity. This oscillation is the key to understanding how a medium refashions its predecessors and other contemporary media’ (Bolter and Grusin 2000: 19). Bolter and Grusin are writing about the introduction of digital media, but this oscillation can also be seen in the form of Muddiman’s newsletter and the Gazette. They shared a format, the single half-­sheet folio printed or written on both sides and measuring roughly 7 × 11 inches. They displayed characteristics of mass production, as they were both produced by stables of clerks. Such elements demonstrate the physical and visual continuity between the two ­media – ­the effect of immediacy that denies a change has taken place. As late as 1696 printer Ichabod Dawks tried to efface the differences between manuscript and print with a specially designed type for his weekly printed News-Letter that mimicked handwriting. But the newspapers also introduced elements that were more easily achievable in print, such as the column type setting, the use of italics for the names of people and places, and the greater quantity of text. Such features draw attention to themselves as print and thus highlight the introduction of a new medium. Continuity and discontinuity existed side by side in newsletters and newspapers, without a clear trajectory from written to printed news. One of the most significant correspondences in format between the two ­media – ­significant because it had implications for the content and reliability of the ­items – w ­ as their reliance on the paragraph as, in Will Slauter’s words, the ‘basic unit of news’ (Slauter 2012: 253). Each item of news was generally a single paragraph long, with that paragraph assigned a dateline: the location and date of the letter in which the news had arrived (see Figure 6.2). More significant diplomatic locations such as Paris, Rome and the Hague might have multiple news items assigned to them, but in general each piece of news would be separated into its own paragraph. Slauter focuses on the newspaper in the late eighteenth century, but his analysis also serves for earlier newsletters and newspapers when he argues that ‘the division of periodicals into distinct paragraphs facilitated the movement of news from one place to another’ (Slauter 2012: 255). Writers and printers could add or subtract paragraphs taken from diplomatic correspondence, personal letters and other newsletters and newspapers to fit their space needs. As Slauter continues, ‘Interdependence did not lead to uniformity: while the paragraph was a printed object that was easily reproduced, it was also a composite text ready to be revamped’ (Slauter 2012: 257). A newsletter or a

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Figure 6.2  Newsletter showing the paragraph-based layout of items assigned to datelines, January 1634 (anonymous newsletter, Huntington Library, mssHM 66704)

newspaper was essentially a compilation of paragraphs, mostly taken from other sources but sometimes based on in-­person observation and report, with the datelines differentiating items based on their locations. This formatting convention indicated to the reader that news had been sourced: it originated from sources other than the individual writer or printer – implicitly, reliable diplomatic sources. As Nicholas Brownlees shows, the newspaper achieved credibility by presenting its editor as able to access, interpret and relay multiple epistolary sources of news: ‘As a result, the published news is presented as not the account of one personal viewpoint but instead as a composite picture of assorted epistolary news’ (Brownlees 2016: 400). Paragraphs were convenient for both writers and printers, but they were also a material representation of the news networks on which writers based their productions. Newsletters’ and newspapers’ shared material features helped train readers to expect the standardisation and periodicity that would come

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from manuscript to print 155 to define the circulation of news. Newsletters had their origins in the sixteenth-­century Italian genre of the avvisi, and had circulated in England since the 1630s, but they became more extensive and systematic following the Restoration (De Vivo 2006: 35; Sutherland 1986: 6). Although newsbooks had run in series and sometimes claimed periodical publication, they did not adhere to a strict schedule. Meanwhile, in the seventeenth century the Gazette appeared twice a week and the Whitehall newsletters three times a week, the latter on the post days of Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, whether or not they contained important new information. The Gazette missed only one printing following the Great Fire of London (Sutherland 1986: 12). Both newsletters and newspapers often noted a dearth of information when the ‘foreign mails’ had not arrived. The overlapping format of manuscript and print news emphasised the interconnection of the media, demonstrating how they drew from each other and relied on other correspondence networks for their information. This format carried with it a number of assumptions about the shared and divergent content of newsletters and newspapers, as the next section will discuss.

The Content of Scribal and Printed News It was not only in material form and visual appearance that newsletters and newspapers overlapped, but also in the content of the news. Scholars of news history have often asserted that the reasons for the persistence of manuscript newsletters after the take-­off in printed news were related to censorship and government control of print publications. Sabrina A. Baron, for example, writes that ‘the underlying purpose of the manuscript news was to report domestic events of political significance’, although she goes on to call the idea of an official government ban on printing domestic news ‘a fiction’ (Baron 2001: 46). While printers might have been easier to trace than newsletter writers, both written and printed productions were subject to the law of seditious libel; efforts to suppress news circulation, such as James II’s proclamation banning ‘false news’ in 1688, targeted written, printed and oral sources (Baron 2001: 46). Alex W. Barber, while noting that ‘the first decades of the 18th century were not simply dominated by printed news and periodicals, nor did they witness a straightforward contest between print on the one hand and scribal communication on the other’, argues that the reason manuscript newsletters continued was ‘the difficult relationship between press and parliament’, with newsletters existing largely to transmit parliamentary news that

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could not be printed (Barber 2013: 295–6). But while newsletters did frequently include parliamentary news, prohibitions on reporting on Parliament varied in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; in 1680, for example, Parliament began to allow the printing of its daily votes and transactions, although this was periodically reversed and the details of debates were generally reported with a significant time lag or with pseudonyms and codes (Barker 2000: 77–9; Fraser 1956: 123). Both newsletter and newspaper writers were prosecuted for circulating parliamentary news, with newsletter writer John Dyer arrested at least five times between 1693 and 1698 (Snyder 1977: 5). As Peter Fraser writes, ‘All news, either printed or in manuscript, that was not derived from the Secretary’s office or officially licensed, was considered “false news”, and declared illegal by proclamation and order in council’ (1956: 115). The continuance of manuscript newsletters after the emergence of the newspaper, and particularly after the lapse of licensing and subsequent take-­off in newspaper publication in 1695, cannot be entirely or even primarily attributed to legal prohibitions on print. Although there are certainly cases where manuscript newsletters offer more detailed parliamentary news, political information or aristocratic gossip than would be available in printed newspapers, overall there is more convergence than divergence in the type and style of news circulated in manuscript and print. This is particularly true of the commercial newsletters that flourished alongside new newspapers following the lapse of licensing. In many locations, the first newspaper producers were, like Muddiman, also newsletter writers, and they continued to issue both media. As Andrew Pettegree writes of the Strasbourg Gazette, which newsletter writer Johann Carolus started in 1605, ‘The output itself would not be essentially different: still the same sequence of bald news items familiar from his manuscript news service’ (2014: 183). A century later, John Campbell’s manuscript ­newsletter – w ­ hich his father Duncan Campbell had started in the ­1690s – b ­ ecame the printed Boston News-Letter, the first continuously published newspaper in New England (Clark 1994: 73). At this point, Ian Atherton notes, most newsletters consisted of ‘dry factual reporting’ (1999b: 57). Erin Keating calls the newsletter a ‘supplement’ to the printed paper, noting that while the writers positioned their letters as ‘meant for a more elite class of reader who can be trusted with sensitive ­details . . . ­In reality, the manuscript newsletters being written from Whitehall were not substantively different from the printed London Gazette’ (2017: 38–9). Many news items appeared in both newsletters and newspapers, with each medium copying from the other.

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from manuscript to print 157 This similarity in content was due to the fact that, for the most part, newsletters were not tailored to recipients but were produced by teams of clerks copying from a master letter; that is, the news was not personalised but mass produced. In 1705 it was estimated that Dyer employed 30–40 clerks for his newsletter, which circulated to as many as 500 recipients (Barber 2013: 298). As in newspapers, commercial newsletter reports frequently concerned foreign locations rather than domestic information. This foreign orientation was related to the epistolary method of reportage: because news paragraphs were often derived from diplomatic correspondence or other periodicals circulating in the mail, they featured a high proportion of foreign reports. Lacking the modern feature of headlines, both newsletters and newspapers followed a typical organisation, moving from the most recently arrived diplomatic news through the Scottish and Irish notices to the port and shipping ­news – ­pertaining to locations such as Portsmouth, Plymouth and B ­ ristol – ­and concluding with miscellaneous London and court items. In newsletters, this local information would often be squeezed into the paper’s margins. A numerical comparison of the items in newsletters and newspapers can help illuminate their similarities and differences. I analysed two sequences of documents in the Huntington Library’s collection of 126 newsletters sent from London to Tamworth, Staffordshire (Huntington Library mssHM 30659). The entire collection covers the period 1690 to 1710, but breaks into two chunks from 1690 to 1697 and 1709 to 1710, with a few undated letters that have been excluded from this analysis. I hand counted the datelines in the letters, counting each paragraph as a separate item assigned to a location. The results show that, in this series of newsletters, the news grew more foreign in orientation over this period. In the earlier series of letters roughly 65 per cent of the items, or 469 out of 711 paragraphs, pertained to London news. This result is partly skewed by the fact that the London notices tend to be s­ horter – t­ hat is, there are more, shorter paragraphs of London ­news – b ­ ut it gives an overall estimate of the material. Nearly 12 per cent of the items, or 85 in total, pertained to other English locations, while the remaining 22 per cent consisted of foreign news, with the most remote items concerning New York, Aleppo and the East Indies (see Figure 6.3). In the later series, however, these figures are nearly reversed. Sixty out of a total of 229 paragraphs, or 26 per cent, concern London, while approximately 67 per cent of the news was foreign (other domestic locations accounted for about 7 per cent) (see Figure 6.4). In comparison, from January to July 1695, approximately 64 per cent of the news in the London Gazette was

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Figure 6.3  Map of the distribution of news items in a series of newsletters from 1690 to 1697

foreign, while less than 10 per cent was datelined ‘London’. In 1710 the numbers for the Gazette were similar to those for the newsletter, with approximately 31 per cent of items pertaining to London, another 31 per cent domestic, and the remaining 38 per cent, or 329 items, foreign. Ashley Marshall points out that just because news was ‘foreign’ did not mean it lacked domestic political significance; during the War of the Spanish Succession, for example, newspapers put different emphases on their continental military news according to whether they supported the Whig position of ‘no peace without Spain’ or the Tory push for a treaty to end the war (Marshall 2020: 27, 16). In an era of continual continental war, foreign and domestic news was intertwined. The newsletters in this collection are likely those issued by Dyer; an endorsement on one letter reads, ‘Newes Letters Foxes, and Dyers. &c.’, and the ones I have counted here follow the Dyer format of a four-­ page bifolium (Huntington Library mssHM 30659, f. 98). The High Church Tory Dyer was known for high-­quality political gossip and, as previously mentioned, he was arrested on multiple occasions for parliamentary reporting (Barber 2013: 299, 303–5). But as these results show, his letters included a significant proportion, even a majority in certain periods, of foreign news. Representative newsletters from

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Figure 6.4  Map of the distribution of news items in a series of newsletters from 1709 to 1710

this collection illustrate the mixture of foreign and domestic items. The 1 February 1709 issue follows the typical organisation, beginning with news from Vienna, moving through items from the Rhine, ‘the Spanish Netherlands’ and Edinburgh, and noting, ‘We have nothing from our Ports but an account that several Merchant Ships viz. 7 or 8 for Hambrough some for Lisbon and five from Virginia were driven ashore in Margate Road and the River’ (f. 100). At the bottom of the final page, and in the margins of the letter, the writer included the local information: Yesterday being the Anniversary for the Murder of K: Charles the 1st by the Fanaticks ’twas very religiously observed. Dr Bridges preached before the Queen in the Chappell Royall at St ­James . . . ­the Bishop of Exeter before the Lor­ds . . . ­and Dr Pelling before the Commons. Meanwhile, the issue of 2 May 1696 featured almost no foreign items, with eleven paragraphs of London news focusing on William III’s preparations to depart for Holland, in particular the knighthoods and honours he bestowed before departing (f. 69). Even some of these items, however, concerned diplomatic information, for example the report that ‘the Venetian Ambassadors had their publick audience

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of his Majesty in the Banquetting House at Whitehall’. In this case, there appears to have been extensive local news to report, but in other instances the preponderance of London items was because, as the letter of 27 August 1691 noted, ‘We want both the Irish & Forraine Mayles’ (f. 22). Foreign news was a standard and expected element of Dyer’s and other newsletters. While commercial newsletters, then, frequently featured a high proportion of foreign news like printed newspapers, other varieties of newsletters existed. The official manuscript newsletter, a continuation of the one that Williamson had overseen during the Restoration, had a more selective readership than the commercial o ­ nes – r­ eaders who often ‘paid’ in news rather than m ­ oney – ­and targeted an elite government audience (Davis 2020: 151–2). In the 1670s Henry Ball, the clerk then in charge of the Whitehall newsletters, issued both a four-­page ‘public’ newsletter and, for some clients, a shorter two-­ page letter with more confidential information. On 20 July 1672, for example, he sent both letters to Sir Willoughby Aston while noting on the shorter letter, ‘I have been silent a great while, the cheife reason whereof was want of any matter more private than the paper to trouble your Honor with’ (Beinecke Osborn b 97, Yale University). Ball’s terminology reveals degrees of privacy within the category of the manuscript newsletter, with Aston receiving both the more and less private ‘papers’. The ‘private’ letter, in this case, gave the details of a failed treaty between England and the Dutch Republic, at the outbreak of the Third Anglo-­ Dutch War. Ball’s main newsletter adhered to the usual style, with paragraphs assigned to datelines, mainly concerning foreign news, and there is only one example of the ‘more private’ letter in this collection. Ball’s shorter letter differed materially from his official newsletters, using the format of personal correspondence, being in his own hand and containing individualised superscriptions for the recipient. The diplomatic correspondence that provided much of the information in both manuscript newsletters and printed newspapers also crossed this public–private border. The collection and transmission of news was a standard element of the diplomat’s job, but not only to keep superiors at home apprised of happenings in the field. Diplomats were also regularly reminded that one of their roles was to provide news items for the London Gazette, which continued to be published out of the office of the Secretary of State for the Northern Department. In the early eighteenth century the Secretary of State’s office periodically sent out a form letter to diplomats reminding them of their role as suppliers of news:

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from manuscript to print 161 His Majesty has been pleased to give Direction that the London Gazette, which is published by the Royal Authority, should for the future be regularly and sufficiently furnished with all proper Advices and Intelligence from abroad; I am to desire you to transmit constantly under cover to [Gazette printer] Mr Buckley at my office, particular accounts of such occurrences and Transactions as do from time to time become the Subject of News at the Place where you reside. (Lord Carteret to Thomas Lumley, 5 February 1723, National Archives, Kew, SP 89/30/72) It was not just that diplomatic correspondence was used as the source of news, but that, at least by the eighteenth century, this was a formalised arrangement for sourcing the Gazette. In keeping with such directions, diplomats often composed their correspondence in a news paragraph style so that items could be easily excerpted and inserted into newsletters and newspapers. A series of letters in the early 1700s between Adam Cardonnel, secretary to the Duke of Marlborough, and Under-­Secretary of State George Tilson, now held in the British National Archives, illuminates news gathering methods. Cardonnel was encamped with Marlborough at continental battlefields during the War of the Spanish Succession, and he frequently conveyed not only news about the battles but also advice about the management of the Gazette, then under the editorship of Richard Steele, just prior to Steele’s inauguration of the Tatler. In June 1708, for example, Cardonnel wrote to Tilson that he should caution Mr Steele in his Grace’s name, not to insert any thing in his Gazet relating to Prince Eugene [of Savoy] or his motions, but what you have from hence, for we receive false reports of that kind from all parts, in a post or two we shall be able to furnish him with a paragraph of his Highness’s motions that may be depended on. (28 June 1708, SP 87/4/27) A few weeks later he asked Tilson to ‘give a copy of this to Mr Steele for the Gazette’, adding, ‘he will do well to consult my Lord Stairs who may be able to give him some particulars before the world knows’ (SP 87/4/31). The 8 July issue of the Gazette was a four-­page special with a lengthy account of the victory at Oudenaarde that Cardonnel had outlined. Six weeks later he again instructed Tilson, ‘you will please to give the enclos’d relation to Mr Steel [sic] for the Gazet’, although this enclosure does not survive, presumably because it was used for copy (87/4/32). However, it seems that Cardonnel himself sometimes provided untrustworthy information, as in October 1708 when he wrote,

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‘I am sorry Mr Steel is so much blam’d for what he put into the Gazette relating to the siege, since it came from hence, but I assure you we were then in a very melancholy cue’ (87/4/48). He understood one of his primary jobs to be providing news for the Gazette to the extent that he took responsibility for inaccurate information that appeared in the paper. At the same time Cardonnel also discussed manuscript news transmission as part of his role. In August 1708 he referred to ‘the old complaint against our circular’, an apparent reference to the manuscript ‘circular’, or news digest, that diplomats produced to send to particular officials, news writers and coffee houses in London (SP 87/4/58). It is unclear from just this half of the correspondence precisely what the complaint was, but it appears there were concerns about items in the circular ending up in print, as Cardonnel writes, ‘there is none goes over beside, except to Sir Tho: Frankland, Mr Bridges, your two offices & the Secretary of Warr, if you can find out any of them that make an ill use of it they shall have none for the future’, adding that someone in the Secretary of War’s office might ‘hand [it] to the Press’. So while Cardonnel took an active role in providing copy for the Gazette, he also maintained a separate newsletter that was not intended for print. These examples illustrate that much of the crossover between written and printed news was due to their shared grounding in epistolary news-­gathering methods. This was even the case within the British Isles, as manuscript newsletters make frequent reference to the ‘Port letters’ – arriving from Plymouth, Portsmouth, Milford Haven and other coastal l­ ocations – ­as a category of news, and treat Edinburgh and Dublin as foreign diplomatic locations. In the 1730s Walter Cary, secretary to the Duke of Dorset, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, sent a series of letters to Charles Delafaye, a clerk in the Secretary of State’s office and then-­compiler of the Gazette. Every time Dorset arrived in Ireland Cary sent an enclosure with a datelined paragraph drawn up ‘that it may be inserted, as usual, in the London Gazette’ (SP 63/396/1767). In one letter, Cary deviated from the standard to write in his own hand, ‘I am very much concern’d to hear that you are laid up by the gout, & could not help expressing it in this publick letter, thô perhaps against form.’ This turn of phrase shows us how a public–private binary does not apply in the realm of manuscript news, as diplomatic correspondence brought together official and personal concerns in the process of delivering items that might be intended for manuscript newsletters, printed newspapers, or both. There were not strict guidelines about what could and could not be printed, but rather degrees of publicity and expanding concentric circles of readers and correspondents. The

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from manuscript to print 163 genre of the diplomatic circular again highlights, if in a different register, the ongoing dynamic nature of the news ecosystem in the early eighteenth century. As we have seen, then, commercial and official manuscript newsletters remained important news media for at least the first fifty years of the London Gazette’s existence, and letters remained primary sources of news for much longer. Although certain categories of information, such as parliamentary speeches, aristocratic gossip and Court machinations, may be more common in manuscript than in print, it is difficult to draw clean lines between the kinds of information included in each medium, and there was frequent overlap in content. The explanation for the continuance, and indeed expansion, of manuscript newsletters after 1665 and especially 1695 lies not in the content but the concept of news. As people came to expect more frequent u ­ pdates – ­the leading papers in the 1690s and early 1700s were thrice weeklies, and the first daily paper appeared in 1­ 702 – ­they wanted multiple sources to compare and verify. As Joseph Addison wrote in 1712 in his famous discussion of Britons’ ‘general Thirst after News’, the news writers all receive the same Advices from abroad, and very often in the same Words; but their way of Cooking it is so different, that there is no Citizen, who has an Eye to the Public Good, that can leave the Coffee-­house with Peace of Mind, before he has given every one of them a Reading. (Addison and Steele 1965, IV: 90) Newsletters added to the general circulation of news. Each medium had its advantages and disadvantages: manuscript news was more direct and, often, reliable, ­but – a­ t £5 to £20 per year rather than 1 penny per ­issue – ­it was more expensive, and less text could fit on the page. Printed newspapers might have less domestic information, but they were more accessible and each issue contained a greater quantity of news. Just as today, readers might prefer different media for different reasons, but it is likely that many news ­consumers – ­who, of course, still made up a small slice of the p ­ opulation – ­interacted with multiple media. Alex W. Barber argues that ‘For the early 18th century, where we have evidence of newspaper and periodical purchasing, the vast majority of individuals read printed and scribal texts together’ (2013: 302). Newsletters and manuscript correspondence continued to play a vital role in the news ecosystem.

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Manuscript News in the Later Eighteenth Century Although newsletters and newspapers coexisted for the first boom in newspaper t­itles – ­from roughly 1695 to ­1715 – ­professional manuscript news services seem to have declined after that period, even as newspapers continued to expand. The bulk of the newsletters that remain in library archives span the late seventeenth to early eighteenth centuries, like those examined here so far; for example, the nearly 4,000 newsletters in the Folger Library’s Newdigate newsletter collection date from 1674 to 1715. John Dyer died in 1713, putting an end to his successful newsletter; in 1714 the War of the Spanish Succession, which had been a main topic of news for the previous decade, ended. The newsletters that I have examined that date from after the 1710s consist mainly of foreign military news, indicating that they are perhaps more akin to the diplomatic ‘circulars’ than to earlier commercial newsletters. It is possible that by this point there were enough printed sources to choose from, including weekly, thrice-­ weekly, daily and provincial papers, that the additional news provided by newsletters was not worth the extra cost. Newspaper circulations also grew in this period; while in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries many newspapers were small-­scale operations with circulations in the hundreds, this grew to an average circulation for London papers of 1,000–2,000 from the 1720s through 1740s, and by 1780 there were nine London dailies with circulations in the range of 2,000–5,000 (Barker 2000: 31). Although some newsletters, such as Dyer’s, circulated in the hundreds of copies, a manuscript service could not keep up with these higher numbers. While the lack of later newsletters in archives could be due to the vagaries of historical preservation, thousands survive from before about 1715 while few appear after that date. It appears that the market for manuscript newsletters narrowed significantly in this period. However, late eighteenth-­ century newspapers maintained many of the epistolary features of early written and printed news. There was little change in the appearance of the newspaper through the eighteenth century, although after 1725 the single leaf printed in two columns on both sides expanded to a four-­page bifolium, often with larger sheet sizes (Barker 2000: 43). The basic structure of the paper remained that of news paragraphs assigned to datelines, with no headlines and little white space. Pettegree notes that ‘Eighteenth-­century newspapers are striking for an absence of design innovation’ (2014: 313). Advertising, which had first appeared in the London Gazette in 1670, played an increasingly prominent role; Michael Harris writes

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from manuscript to print 165 that advertising’s ‘presence was one, perhaps the only, clear content division between the manuscript newsletter and the printed serial’ (1999: 143–4). Alongside the news derived from ‘letters received’, the form of the letter to the editor also developed, distinguished by an opening ‘Sir’ and longer than the usual news paragraphs. Hannah Barker writes that most of what we would now identify as editorial or opinion writing appeared in such letters, and while these letters were ‘signed’ they were still anonymous, with the signatures indicating representative roles such as a farmer or a citizen (1998: 40). Incorporating letters in this way allowed newspapers to represent themselves as in conversation with an engaged and growing public, and they placed an increasing emphasis on ‘public opinion’ in the second half of the eighteenth century (Barker 2000: 22). Letters remained a main source of content and provided a mechanism for incorporating new modes of opinion writing into the newspaper. The postal system also continued to be the main distribution mechanism for newspapers in the British Isles. Pettegree argues that the technological change that enabled the development of printed news was not in ­reproduction – ­that is, in the technology of the printing ­press – ­but in distribution, with the post becoming quicker, cheaper and more reliable (2014: 167). Others have called a reliable public postal system a ‘precondition for the development of a (relatively) periodic newspaper press’ (Schobesberger et al. 2016: 19). The eighteenth century saw the ongoing systematisation and interconnection of the postal system, with by-­posts, cross-­posts and packet boats speeding transmission times and uniting the British news system (King 2018: 54). Although these changes would also affect ­newsletters – ­and in fact, the ability to add new information up to the moment of sending to the post was an advantage for the manuscript ­medium – ­over time the emphasis on speed and quantity favoured print. Joad Raymond and Noah Moxham argue that postal routes ‘are a necessary though not sufficient foundation of periodical news, and determine its periodicity’ (Raymond and Moxham 2016: 11); as we saw, both bi-­weekly and thrice-­weekly newspapers published on post days. Many newspapers established relationships with postmasters, who distributed the papers and often supplied the editors with news (Sutherland 1986: 94, 132). The significance of the post is evident in the titles of newspapers such as the Post Boy, the Post Man and the Flying Post. Readers understood that there was an intimate connection between news and letters even after most professional news circulation had shifted to print. Until recently, studies of the history of the newspaper have emphasised its descent from other printed genres, with manuscript sources

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relatively neglected. This orientation derived from that of scholars of eighteenth-­century politics and the public sphere towards print media. A number of scholars have now charted the significance of manuscript newsletters in a range of contexts in the seventeenth century, and further research shows the long-­lasting influence that newsletters and news correspondence had on the printed newspaper throughout the eighteenth century. As David Randall argues, ‘The pervasive influence of English manuscript news during the decades of the emergence of English printed news ensured that English epistolary rhetoric would provide the chief model for English newspaper rhetoric’ (2008b: 25). News consumers in this period assumed that most news, and often the most reliable news, would be sourced from letters. Manuscript news exerted an ongoing influence on the form, content and circulation of printed newspapers.

Case Study 4: The Post Boy Rachael Scarborough King In the wake of the lapse of the Licensing Act in May 1695, three main newspapers appeared within months (one of them within days): the Flying Post, the Post Man and the Post Boy. The title of each paper signalled its close connection to the post and orientation towards provincial distribution. These papers emphasised the reliance of news on the postal system for both content and means of circulation. The two more successful papers, the Post Man and Post Boy, also initiated a small effort towards visual decoration in the newspaper format with woodcuts in the banner; in the Post Boy these were of a post boy blowing his bugle on horseback and Mercury, the god of news, also blowing a bugle, while the Post Man featured a packet ship and a post boy image nearly identical to that of the Post Boy. These images would become part of the visual language of eighteenth-­century news, with the Dublin Post, for example, employing its own post boy and packet ship woodcuts (Kennedy 2005: 77). These papers used images associated with the postal system as a metonym for their own reliability. It was not only in news gathering and distribution that the papers emphasised their epistolary basis. Each also advertised that they could be purchased with an additional blank page or leaf so that handwritten letters could be added to the printed newspaper. The Flying Post noted that it offered blank space ‘done on good Writing Paper, with Blanks so ordered, that any one may write of their Private Affairs into the Country’ (quoted in Clark 1994: 22). Given that these papers highlighted their provincial circulation, they implied that London readers could update the printed page with more private or local

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case study 4 : the post boy 167 news to send into the country. However, surviving examples show that the blank pages facilitated the development of a hybrid manuscript-­print newsletter service. The William Andrews Clark Memorial Library at UCLA holds a collection of several hundred manuscript newsletters as well as copies of the Post Boy and the Post Man with manuscript additions (see Figure 6.5). Although the Post Man advertised that the publisher would provide ‘a Postscript on the 3d side of a whole Sheet, which shall be done upon good Paper and shall contain, all the most Remarkable occurrences’, it added that the extra pages could also be used by ‘any Gentlemen or News Writer’ (Post Man, no. 284, 4 March 1697). The fact that the manuscript additions appear on both the Post Man and the Post Boy indicates that the papers were bought by a third party, a professional newsletter writer, who then added the manuscript news. The two papers were rivals, the former published by Richard Baldwin and edited

Figure 6.5  The Post Boy for 23 November 1710 with a manuscript newsletter added to the blank leaf left at the end of the newspaper (Pole News Collection, William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, MS. 1951.021, Box 4, Folder 6, University of California, Los Angeles)

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by the fiercely Whig Huguenot émigré Jean de Fonvive, the latter by the Tory Abel Roper (Sutherland 1986: 26). The clerks’ hands are consistent across the papers, and there are also standalone manuscript ­newsletters – ­that is, ones that were not added to the printed ­papers – ­in the collection in the same handwriting, showing that a single office used both newspapers to add scribal news. Rather than the blank leaf of the newspapers offering space for personal correspondence, it was used to create a mixed manuscript-­printed news genre that took advantage of the affordances of each medium. The interaction between handwritten and printed news that is made clearest in these hybrid documents elucidates the role that manuscript continued to play in the turn-­of-­the-­eighteenth-­century news media market. The scribal and printed sections frequently covered the same pieces of news, each medium filling in missing details. The ‘postscript’ to the 27 August 1695 Post Boy, for example, presented similar straightforward, foreign news as the printed portion: It’s said there will be a meeting of the Allyes in London this Winter. It’s wrote from Ostend that the D. of Bavaria had sent orders to provide Quarters there for 2500 men more then they had last Winter and to be all English. They write from Venice that a party of theres had killed & taken 400 Turkes of the Garrison of Negropont. (Clark MS.1951.021, Box 2) It is frequently the case that the manuscript addition updates the printed paper, including news that had arrived since printing. For example, in the 29 August 1695 issue, the Post Boy reported from London that ‘It has been noised about for these three days, that the Castle of Namur was taken by the Confederates; but the Holland Mail of Friday last, nor any Express being not yet arrived, it was believed that the Report was only grounded upon probabilities and conjectures’ (Clark MS.1951.021, Box 3, folder 34). The manuscript addition, dated 29 August, confirmed the Allied victory, concluding, ‘The Lords Justices have ordered a Proclamation for a publick Thanksgiving throughout England for the takeing of Namur.’ Although the manuscript news occasionally includes more detailed parliamentary information, such as the content of debates, this also works as an update and expansion of the shorter, more cryptic parliamentary news included in the printed paper. Both portions included only occasional local London news even though the service seems to have been designed for country readers. Despite the fact that an editorial hand is still apparent, script and print worked together to give the reader the impression of receiving all the available news in one convenient package. The content of the news also demonstrated this multimedia communications system, as the written news often commented on the printed while, as described above, printed news advertised its reliance on ‘letters received’. The manuscript addition to the Post Boy of 4 February 1697 noted that ‘yesterday

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case study 4 : the post boy 169 2 dutch posts came in & brot letters from Paris with K. Jamses [sic] manifesto to the Catholick princes which will be printed here by authority with animadversions & an answer to it’ (Clark MS.1951.021, Box 4, folder 1), once again illustrating how news moved from manuscript to print and back again (‘letters from Paris’  printed animadversions and answer  newsletter report). The ‘postscripts’ include a variety of clerks’ hands and almost no personalised notes to the recipient, Anne Pole of Radbourne Hall in Derbyshire, to the extent that almost all of the newsletters open with ‘Sir’ although they are addressed to a woman. Pole received the thrice-­weekly standalone newsletters and hybrid Post Boys and Post Mans for nearly twenty years, until at least the early 1710s. This was a reliable, periodical service to which she subscribed as a regular and long-­standing source of news. The Clark Library Pole News Collection helps clarify the role that manuscript newsletters continued to play in early eighteenth-­ century news circulation, exemplifying the convergence of scribal and printed news sources at this point in news history. Rather than the newsletter providing sensitive news that could not be included in the newspaper, the ‘postscripts’ offered a fuller picture of news that was also in print. Readers continued to pay a premium for additional manuscript news for decades after the advent of the printed newspaper.

Chapter Seven

NEWSBOOK TO NEWSPAPER: CHANGING FORMAT, LAYOUT AND ILLUSTRATION IN SEVENTEENTH- AND EIGHTEENTH-­CENTURY PERIODICAL NEWS Yann Ryan Introduction This chapter is an account of the development of the physical a­ spects – ­format, layout and ­illustrations – ­of printed periodical news in Britain and Ireland, from its beginnings in 1620 to its relative stabilisation in the early part of the eighteenth century. The unwieldy term ‘printed periodical news’ is used deliberately, as the word ‘newspaper’ was not used until ­later – b ­ efore that, a whole range of terms were common (Arblaster et al. 2016: 90–6). The changes in these physical aspects cannot be explained simply by a process of evolution or reaction to market forces, but should be considered in the context of politics, censorship, contingency and attempts to establish credibility. Additionally, the form of the British and Irish newspaper was profoundly influenced by the wider European news market and network. Today the word ‘newspaper’ conjures up an (albeit increasingly anachronistic) object with a fairly recognisable set of characteristics: a publication printed either in tabloid or broadsheet format, probably at least weekly, with an identical title from week to week, containing pages with multiple columns of text, headlines and individual articles of news (Frank 1961: 1). This was not the case with the earliest printed news publications. Some had consecutive numbering, others restarted each week or had none; some had the same or similar titles, others 170

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newsbook to newspaper 171 completely different ones each week; some printed news in a book or pamphlet style, others in a larger ‘newspaper’ format with multiple columns. What did remain consistent, however, was the use of form and layout to say something about the content itself, whether to establish credibility, emphasise (or hide) certain items, or draw attention to editorial content. While at first they copied the printing traditions of books, these publications soon developed their own distinct, if multifarious, style.

The First Corantos, 1621–41 The history and provenance of the very first printed periodical news in England is difficult to unpack, chiefly because the survival of the earliest publications is haphazard and they were produced by a number of complicated and unstable partnerships and syndicates (on the details, see Boys 2011; Raymond 1996; Muddiman 1908; Frearson 1993; Frank 1961), the evidence for which remains mostly in the imprints of the individual issues and occasional entries in the Stationers’ Register. A very rough narrative of these years goes something like this: the first news was a single small folio sheet in English, published in Amsterdam in 1620; followed by news published in London, but with (probably) false imprints of Amsterdam (Dahl 1953; Hanson 1938: 358); then news printed in London with a London imprint, in 1621; followed by officially sanctioned publications, in quarto, with separate title pages and a single column from 1622 (Morison [1932] 2009: 10–13; Hutt 1973: 10). These in turn lasted until 1632 when a Star Chamber decree banned all printed news until 1638, when production resumed (Raymond 1996: 12). In 1641, when the licensing restrictions ended on the establishment of the Long Parliament, the corantos were supplanted by a new type of publication, called here for simplicity’s sake a ‘parliamentary diurnal’. The diurnals supplied domestic parliamentary news, unlike corantos which just carried foreign news. The format of corantos was influenced by similar continental publications. The very first extant, from December 1620, had no title but began with the phrase ‘The new tydings out of Italie are not yet com’ in place of a header in the left-­hand column (The new tydings out of Italie are not yet com, STC (2nd edn), 18507.1). Starting in July 1621, several more of these single-­sheet corantos were printed, with a single-­line ­title – i­n roman ­italics – a­ cross the top of the page. It is likely there were several other imported English-­language publications earlier than this, as there are references to them, though none have survived (Dahl 1953: 49; Boys 2011: 69–70). They had a layout

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of two columns separated by a rule, and the paragraphs of news themselves were printed in blackletter and headed in roman t­ ype – ­except for the first surviving issue, in which paragraphs were printed in roman with headings in italic (Hutt 1973: 9). Each paragraph was not about a single event, but rather all the news gathered from a place of dispatch, a rubric that had been in place for handwritten news since the sixteenth century, and one that, particularly for foreign news, would hold firm for a long time (Dooley 2016; Raymond and Moxham 2016: 7). This format remained until a switch to what can be termed ‘book style’ periodicals in 1622 (A True Relation of the Affaires of Europe, especially, France, Flanders, and the Palatinate, 4 October 1622, STC (2nd edn), 18507.81). These were quarto publications, of varying ­lengths – a­ t first a single quarto sheet of eight pages, then either two or three sheets. Each had a full title page (see Figure 7.1), and a shortened

Figure 7.1  The title page of a ‘book-style’ coranto with the imprint Nathaniel Butter, showing some of the typical elements, including the extensive title and sequential numbering [Call #: STC 25201a.2] (Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons AttributionShareAlike 4.0 International Licence)

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newsbook to newspaper 173 version of the title was generally printed at the top of the first page of text. The titles of these first series varied, though they eventually cohered around a few recognisable catch words, usually beginning ‘A continuation of our Weekly News’ or ‘A continuation of our foreign avisoes’. Most of the time the title page would contain a list summing up the most important content contained within (for example A continuation of our Weekly News 16, 29 March–7 April 1625, STC (2nd edn), 18507.165). They were published by various combinations of a group of stationers including Nathaniel Butter, Nicholas Bourne and Thomas Archer (Boys 2011: 70; Raymond 1996: 8; Dahl 1953: 49). Butter and Bourne were both experienced printers (Rostenberg 1957: 25–6, 27–8), and subsequently published as a partnership without Archer (Raymond 1996: 8; Muddiman 1908: 15). The next key development was sequential numbering. Butter and Bourne were responsible for the first numbered series, of fifty issues in total, which began publication towards the end of 1622 (Dahl 1953: 86; Black 2001: 4), the first extant being issue 2 with the title A Relation of the Late Occurrents Which have happened in Christendome (15 October 1622, STC (2nd edn), 18507.82), followed by ten successive series of fifty issues each. Very few issues of each series have survived (Dahl 1953: 22). Nine series were published between 1622 and 1632, while the last one was published in 1­ 638 – t­ he gap the result of a Star Chamber decree banning the publication of foreign news (Thompson 1998: 669). The publication schedule of the first corantos and later newsbooks was, according to their editors at least, dictated by the regularity of the inland post rather than foreign letters: the series published between 1622 and 1632 appeared at irregular intervals: in March 1624 Nathaniel Butter’s publication contained an explanation that because of the publication schedules of his sources, ‘sometimes you may have two Corantoes in one Weeke’ (Newes from Europe: with the particular Accidents, 19 March 1624, STC 18507.145). This basic layout was subject to constant minor and major variations, for example printing a short commentary in the margins (The Continuation of the former Newes, 8, 21 November 1622, STC (2nd edn), 18507.90) or additional sheets with their own title containing extraordinary news (The Continuation of our weekly newes, 43, 4 December 1624, STC (2nd edn), 18507.158). While most of the text was in prose, corantos did publish occasional lists or tables, such as a table of numbers of men pressed per county (The Continuation of the former Newes, 4 December 1624, STC (2nd edn), 18507.158) or a list of prisoners (The Continuation of the former Newes, 5 May 1625, STC (2nd edn), 18507.169). For a time, editors published the news as

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a single, continuous narrative: sometimes entirely, sometimes the first few pages followed by the regular format of datelined paragraphs.

Civil War Newsbooks, 1641–49 In 1640 Charles I summoned the Short Parliament (soon followed by the Long, which sat until 1648), bringing to an end the era of his personal rule, and ushering in over a decade of civil conflict in Britain and Ireland. In 1641 a new type of publication emerged, publishing weekly accounts of the daily proceedings of Parliament, something that had until this point been strictly forbidden (Frank 1961: 21). In form, they were not direct continuations of the earlier corantos, but very different publications which had to find their own style and readership (Raymond 1996: 9). The first was called Heads of severall proceedings, edited by Samuel Pecke (The heads of severall proceedings in this present Parliament, 29 November 1641, 35:E.201[1])1 and they proliferated over the next few years. Many were, at least implicitly, pro-­ Parliament, though there was a significant royalist print culture based in Oxford (Bowen 2017b; Peacey 2004a; 2005; Tubb 2004; McElligott 2007: 4). The first was a single sheet, folded in quarto, mostly without a separate book-­style title page, albeit with exceptions (The Heads of severall proceedings in both Houses of Parliament, 5 December 1641, 35:E.201[2]). Thereafter, most of the ‘diurnals’ followed this convention and abandoned the ‘book-­style’ title page in favour of a shorter title (Hutt 1973: 13; and see Figure 7.2). Consecutive numbering soon followed, starting with A continuation of the true Diurnall of Last weeks passages, dated 10–17 June 1642 (36:E.202[35]). This kind of pagination signified reliability, and also attested to their value as an item to be collected, archived and cross-­referenced (Millstone 2017: 181). Though the editorial content and networks from which they received their news were often sophisticated, the format of most newsbooks was plain and typographical innovations modest. Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer, published between 1643 and 1649, established a simple form (half-­page title in Roman type, a date between two horizontal rules, consecutive pages and an issue number in the top right) which was taken up by most of the longest-­running titles until the establishment of the Oxford (and then London) Gazette in 1665. Illustrations 1

The microfilm reel numbers are used here as convenient unique identifiers, though unless otherwise stated, all titles were consulted on Early English Books Online, through the JISC Historical Texts platform (https://historicaltexts.jisc.ac.uk/).

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newsbook to newspaper 175

Figure 7.2  Title page of A Perfect Diurnall of the Passages in Parliament, one of several with the same name, attributed to Samuel Pecke. This is typical of the ‘parliamentary diurnals’ of the Civil War period, with numbering, and a half-page title followed by paragraphs containing daily proceedings [Call #: P1486.6 nos. 9–11] (Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence)

were rare though some had woodcuts and decorative initials or factotums (a simple decorative initial with a blank space in the middle where any letter can be inserted) (Morison 2009: 14–36), such as Samuel Pecke’s Perfect Diurnal. Layouts were often piecemeal, including tables, different size types (often last-­minute news squeezed in after the rest of the type had been set), separate foreign news, full proclamations, petitions, bills and printed letters with addresses and signatures. As with the earlier corantos there were countless small modifications to the standard form, such as individually numbering each paragraph (Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer, 2, 3–10 January 1643, 14:E.84[29]). Over time more first-­hand accounts appeared printed as verbatim letters, a practice that continued during the Commonwealth (Brownlees 2016: 407).

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Foreign

Diplomacy/Politics

War & Conflict

Legal/Criminal

Royal Courts

Economics and Trade

Religion

Advertisements

Sensational News

0

20000

40000

0

Lines

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Figure 7.3  Distribution of various news types and source, all titles found in Early English Books Online, for the year 1649. Data collected by the author

These letters often had an address and signature in an attempt to make them seem more genuine. Domestic news was more common, but there was foreign too: an analysis of the content and datelines in a sample ­year – ­1649 – shows a mix of both domestic and foreign, mostly military or political (Figure 7.3). A genre of distinct publications, often called ‘Mercuries’, are another unique feature of the Civil War period. They copied the form of the newsbook, and often contained little news but long prose diatribes and sections of verse, such as the Royalist Mercurius Aulicus. In contrast to the dry style of the diurnals they were vehemently polemical, sometimes with scatological humour. The first were royalist but pro-­Parliament versions were

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newsbook to newspaper 177 soon established (Mercurius Britanicus, 3, 5–12 September 1643, 12:E.67[8]).

The Interregnum, 1650–60 In October 1649 this relatively free culture of news publishing was again suppressed, by order of Parliament (An act against unlicensed and scandalous books and pamphlets, and for better regulating of printing 1649, E971 (Wing)). A few weeks later three officially sanctioned publications appeared, including A Brief Relation, a title that published mostly foreign news (Frank 1961: 200). More followed until 1655, when stricter control over the press was exerted by Cromwell and the Interregnum Council of State (Frank 1961: 253). The experienced journalist Marchamont Nedham was given a monopoly over printed news, and published two books, Mercurius Politicus and Publick Intelligencer. The former was high quality, though it was undoubtedly propaganda and state-­sponsored (Raymond 1998a: 12–13; Frank 1961: 206). Both kept the format of the Civil War era newsbooks: quarto size, with a half-­page title and news presented in paragraphs. In its first years Mercurius Politicus contained editorials outlining Nedham’s classical republican views. Much of Politicus was given over to foreign news, sourced from John Thurloe and Nedham’s own European network of correspondents (Raymond 1998b: 9; 2012: 255). Nedham’s titles are also notable for containing advertisements in significant numbers, mostly for books (Frank 1961: 257), ranging from his own translation of Mare Clausum to work by European intellectuals such as Jan Amos Comenius (Mercurius Politicus, 55, 19–26 June 1651, 97:E.632[20]). These could be innovative: on occasion Nedham put them in the margins (Mercurius Politicus, 130, 2–9 December 1652, 105:E.683[13]; Mercurius Politicus, 25, 21–28 November 1650, 95:E.618[4]). Joad Raymond has suggested that Politicus was the ‘epic and epitaph’ of the Republic; Marcus Nevitt argues that it was the closest thing the Commonwealth had to a literary journal (Nevitt 2017: 219). In 1657 Nedham’s two titles were joined by the Publick Adviser, a title dedicated solely to advertisements and notices (Publick Adviser, 1, 19–26 May 1657, 137:E.912[1]).

A Crystallised Form By the end of this period in the history of the newsbook, a mostly recognisable form and layout could be seen in the weekly publications.

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Quarto format, most often eight pages (though sometimes 12, 16 or 24), consecutive numbering, a half-­page title, the date of coverage, often between horizontal lines, an imprint and a decorative initial. Inside, many titles started with printed domestic news in chronological order, in some cases with foreign inserted as its own separate chronological block in the middle, and then perhaps some last-­minute news on the recto of the final page. The type was invariably roman, with blackletter used sparingly for emphasised text, for example verbatim bills and orders written up by the Clerk of the Parliaments (Perfect occurrences of every dayes journall in Parliament, 123, 4–11 May 1649, 82:E.530[1]). Italics were usually used for proper names, and sometimes sections of text that were to be differentiated from the rest, such as a bill, or letter printed verbatim (Perfect occurrences of every dayes journall in Parliament, 120, 12–19 April 1649, 82:E.529[15]). Within this pattern there were small variations, for example, printing the heads (one-­sentence summaries of the main items) either on the first or last page, and a woodcut (such as the first incarnation of Perfect Diurnall and the Kingdomes Weekly Post). Henry Walker’s Perfect Occurrences contained an inscription in Hebrew with an English translation, linked in some way to the week’s most important events (Perfect occurrences of every dayes journall in Parliament, 66, 7 April 1648, 81:E.522[14]). Illustrations and woodcuts were scarce (Barber 2010: 22), and generally saved for one-­off pamphlets, when they were printed. Some exceptions were the aforementioned Perfect Diurnal, Mercurius Civicus, which had woodcuts depicting an individual in the news, Perfect Summary, which used a very large factotum depicting a sitting Parliament (Hutt 1973: 12), and Perfect Occurrences, which had an unusual factotum incorporating the title (see Figure 7.4). Several titles published short ‘editorial’ pieces, usually commentary on recent events or outlining some political philosophy. As well as Nedham and Mercurius Politicus, John Dillingham outlined his centrist, pro-­army political views as a member of the ‘Middle Group’, defended atrocities in Ireland as necessary and argued for peace among religions (Cotton 1978: 823–32). Henry Walker’s editorial interventions, a Hebraic phrase suitable to that week’s key news, have already been mentioned. The editor of the Moderate printed editorials which included pro-­Leveller arguments for much of its run (The Moderate, 20, 21–28 November 1648, 76:E.473[31]).

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Figure 7.4  Perfect Occurrences, displaying the unusual factotum incorporating the name of the title [Call #: 150-373q] (Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons AttributionShareAlike 4.0 International Licence)

1660–95: The Restoration, Muddiman, L’Estrange, Williamson, Hickes and the London Gazette On the restoration of Charles II the monopoly passed to those loyal to the king, and Nedham’s privilege over printed news was removed. Journalists Henry Muddiman and Giles Dury were given the licences to produce the Monday and Thursday titles respectively. Dury sold his rights to Muddiman the following year; the latter was then responsible for both titles until they were acquired by Roger L’­Estrange – ­a favourite of the Secretary of State, Lord ­Arlington – ­in 1663 (Muddiman 1923: 161–2). This was not the end of Muddiman’s journalistic career, as he was involved in the London Gazette and continued his lucrative handwritten newsletter service. L’Estrange’s two titles (the Newes and the Intelligencer) were a single sheet in quarto, often with significant white space and not much news. L’Estrange made his views of the role

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of printed news clear in the first number of the weekly Intelligencer in August 1663: A Publick Mercury should never have my vote, because I think it makes the multitude too familiar with the actions and counsels of their superiors, too prag-­matical and censorious, and gives them not only an itch, but a land of colourable right and hence to be meddling with the Government. (Intelligencer Published for the Satisfaction and Information of the People, 1, 31 August 1663) L’Estrange believed the form should be flexible depending on what was fit to print that current week, writing that ‘Once a week may do  the  business, for I intend to utter my news by weight, not by ­measure’ (Intelligencer, 1, 31 August 1663). Both titles ran throughout the plague outbreak which hit London in the summer and autumn of 1665, and contained many advertisements for plague cures, as well as official notices and announcements regarding measures to contain the outbreak. In 1665, when the Court moved to Oxford to avoid the plague, Joseph Williamson took the opportunity to establish a new title, the Oxford Gazette, with help from Muddiman, who was later pushed out in a tussle involving the Postmaster James Hickes (see James Hickes to Sir Joseph Williamson, 20 January 1666, National Archives (Kew), SP 29/145 f.109). The Oxford Gazette (which became the London Gazette when the Court returned in 1666) was the first significant break in form and layout in some time. It is often deemed the first true ‘newspaper’ (Hutt 1973: 15; Raymond 1996: 14). It began as a single half-­sheet with two columns, separated by a vertical rule, with the title printed in roman. The words ‘printed by Authority’ were printed underneath, between two horizontal rules, and followed in the next line by the date (see Figure 7.5). News, organised by place of dispatch, was printed in paragraphs. This form set the standard for the rest of the century. Most issues began with some uncontroversial domestic news, often from ports (Fraser 1956: 52), followed by foreign news, ship movements, and finally official proclamations, announcements and a shortened version of the Bill of Mortality (London Gazette, 15 February 1665). Parliamentary news was minimal: it was not seen as fit to print and most of it was reserved for the semi-­private newsletter service also run by Williamson and his office (Marshall 1994: 60). Advertisements were not carried but were given over to a separate publication, the Public Advertiser. There were some other titles at this time, including the Observator published by Roger L’Estrange, and the period is also notable for the establishment of the first Irish newspapers, the

Figure 7.5  The London Gazette for 20–23 August 1694, which was printed in a small folio format, with two columns of text separated by a rule. This set the standard for most titles until the end of the century [Call #: L.c.2360] (Used by permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence)

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News-Letter and the Dublin Intelligence (Munter 1967: 12–14), both of which copied the format of the London press.

1695 Onwards: The Licensing Act, New Influences on Form The Licensing Act was due to end in 1695. As the date approached, Parliament set up a committee and drafted a bill to set up a new regulatory system for the press, but it was killed before being enacted into law (Black 1987: 9). This has long been seen as a watershed moment in the history of the press (Harris 1978: 86). In terms of form and layout, this is the point at which newspapers began to expand in both volume of titles and content (Black 1987: 12). By 1710 there were multiple newspapers, weekly, twice-­weekly and thrice-­weekly, as well as the beginnings of the provincial press. As with the seventeenth century, the surviving evidence for these newspapers is scarce and one must be wary of calculating the total output (Black 1987: 14). Though the British Library’s coverage of newspapers before 1855 is partial, mapping the eighteenth-­century collection can give some indication of the growth and change in the press. The British Library holds no provincial newspapers from before 1695; by the end of the eighteenth century, far more non-­metropolitan titles are held than those described as covering the capital (Figure 7.6). Form and layout evolved in quick succession, too. Two columns gave way to three, such as in the Daily Journal and the Daily Advertiser. Eventually four columns would become the standard for much of the century. Advertisements became more prominent, and titles featured tables of stock and trade figures (Daily Advertiser, 1, 3 February 1731). Political essays became common (Black 1987: 34). While illustrations were still sparse, more elaborate woodcut mastheads can be found, and there were very occasional political cartoons (see Morison 2009: 95; Weekly Journal or British Gazetteer, 1 November 1718). Following 1695 control of the press moved from direct censorship to control through taxation. This in turn influenced the form: the Stamp Act raised a duty on newspapers of 1 penny for whole sheets and half a penny for half-­sheets (Harris 1987: 19–20). The Act had a loophole which meant that publications over one sheet could be registered as pamphlets and pay much less (Slauter 2015: 18). This meant that some newspapers expanded to 1½ sheets or more. This had stylistic consequences: some titles, such as the Flying Post, switched to a larger font (Morison 2009: 86). This taxation regime also favoured weekly

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newsbook to newspaper 183

Figure 7.6  Graph showing the titles available per year for the eighteenth century, as held by the British Library. While very partial, this gives some indication of the rise of the newspaper and in particular the English provincial press.

papers, which could more easily find news to fill the required number of pages, and subsequently the period saw the expansion of weeklies, which published not just news but essays, verse (for example see Weekly Journal or British Gazetteer, 3 January 1713), occasional cartoons, more editorials and so forth. This loophole was closed in 1725, leading to many of the weeklies and extended newspapers going out of business. The early eighteenth-­century form was also influenced by the development of communication technologies such as roads and the postal system. By the end of the seventeenth century there were three weekly posts, leaving London on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday, and arriving on Monday, Wednesday and Friday (Hemmeon 1912: 27). From 1680 London had a city-­wide postal system of at least four posts per day (Hemmeon 1912: 28), and in the middle of the eighteenth century a daily post (except Sunday) was established (Hemmeon 1912: 37). This meant that news arrived in London much more frequently,

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Figure 7.7  Postscript to the Dublin Intelligence, 2 August 1707 (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin)

resulting in the growth of thrice-­weekly newspapers and the first daily title, the Daily Courant, in March 1702. Transparency in the sources of news, at least ostensibly, remained a key element in influencing form and layout. The Daily Courant, for example, explicitly stated its sources, which were usually foreign printed news (Daily Courant, 214, 23 December 1702). Another development was the postscript, with last-­minute news printed on a separate half-­sheet, often referenced in the text (see Figure 7.7). Bogus postscripts were also common (Morison 2009: 66–7). In contrast to the seventeenth century, the eighteenth was a period of stabilisation in terms of overall ­form – ­a newspaper printed at the beginning of the century looked much like one printed at the end, though the latter contained on average more advertisements, including the entire front page (Black 1987: 26). However, in terms of the layout of its content the period saw much innovation. To a considerable extent, the history of print in the eighteenth century involved definition and differentiation, as different forms developed, competed

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newsbook to newspaper 185 and took on particular roles. By this point the publications were beginning to r­ esemble – i­n format and layout at l­east – ­a newspaper that would be recognisable if placed on a newsstand today. Above all, two features dominate the format of the newspaper and are worth exploring in slightly more detail: the ‘paragraph’ and the European influence.

The Importance of the Paragraph The primary unit of news in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was the paragraph. The layout and positioning of these were partially to do with practicality and contingency: news was printed in the order it arrived, though occasionally editorial juxtapositions might be used to alter a story’s meaning (Raymond 1998a: 13). A typical title running from Thursday to Thursday might print parliamentary and domestic news from Thursday, Friday and Saturday, then as the overseas post came in on Friday or Saturday, foreign news, followed by the rest of the week’s parliamentary news, and then perhaps Irish or Scottish news and any last-­minute stories from extraordinary posts on the final p ­ age – ­sometimes in smaller type if it arrived after the rest of the publication had already been set (see, for example, Moderate Intelligencer, 147, 6–13 January 1648, 66:E.422[30]). Publication days were timed to maximise the use of the post: Perfect Diurnall came out on Mondays, meaning it could be sent to the rest of the country in the Tuesday post. When a second post was established on Saturdays, a new publication, A Modest Narrative of Intelligence, was founded, with the explicit intention that it could be sent across the country in the new post, and therefore give readers outside London the freshest news possible (A Modest Narrative of Intelligence, 1, 7 April 1649, 85:E.550[5]). A paragraph of news from a particular place often contained further source information, for example, the news from Hamburg actually consisting of letters from Prague (Mercurius Politicus, 130, 2 December 1652, 105:E.683[13]). Publishing the news in this way allowed readers to trace its movement from the source, adding to the credibility or allowing the reader to make their own judgement as to the reliability of the story. This layout cohered further in the eighteenth century, when the paragraph ended up as the main ‘unit’ of news, which could be passed around, translated and inserted where editors saw fit (Slauter 2012: 259). According to Will Slauter, the paragraph became the chief unit through which news travelled, both within Europe and across the Atlantic. It was also used to aggregate various news sources, as in the satirical Grub-Street Journal (Slauter

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2016: 373). Tracing these can help to understand how editors changed news.

A European News Network Early periodical English news was profoundly European. London was just ­one – ­peripheral – node in a network of European news distribution (Arblaster 2005: 26–8; Schobesberger et al. 2016: 46) The first corantos came about at a time when European news was particularly important, because of the Thirty Years War and English interests in the fate of the king of Bohemia, Frederick V. The European dimension is equally visible in the form, layout and even type: the typical type used by London printers was probably imported from Amsterdam and cast in Frankfurt (Morison 2009: 39). There was even a French-­language newspaper printed in London: Nouvelles ordinaires (Peacey 2016). The impact and use of form and layout can perhaps most clearly be seen in the way that foreign news was treated. Early editing often specified the source of foreign news, and even commented on its likely reliability: We have as many Letters from Prague, as from Vienna, but they com not so open or justifiable, and are many times searched and intercepted, as issued out of a suspicious place, wherein are many unconstant people. (The newes and affaires of Europe, 6 March 1624, STC (2nd edn), 18507.143) Though the first parliamentary diurnals are thought of as domestic news publications, this is not strictly true. Letters from abroad were often read out and discussed in Parliament, and by this route foreign stories made it into the news. As the decade progressed, foreign-­ specialist titles began to appear, including The weekly newes from forraigne parts beyond the seas (1 May 1644, 8:E.44[19]) and Generall nevves from all parts of Christendome, Turkie, and other dominions adjacent (Frank 1961: 115). Most of these were ephemeral titles, though a notable exception was the Moderate Intelligencer, published by John Dillingham, which published both domestic and foreign news, being known above all for high-­ quality foreign news. Foreign news was always separate: in the beginning Dillingham published foreign news as a single paragraph headed from beyond the seas (see, for example, Moderate Intelligencer, 19, 3–10 July 1645, 48:E.292[21]), but by April 1646 he was printing foreign news as a discrete chronological block, containing multiple paragraphs of news, very similar in style to the corantos (Moderate Intelligencer, 60, 23–30 April 1646, 54:E.334[18]).

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newsbook to newspaper 187 This news was probably taken from a common foreign-­ language source and then translated (Curelly 2017: 105). Not only did this allow readers to trace the news, it also could give a sense of how others in Europe received their news. Brendan Dooley has argued that this contributed to a sense of contemporaneity throughout ­Europe – a­ sort of shared perception of experiencing an event at the same time (Dooley 2010: 1). However, at times this was more about giving a general sense of credibility. Most readers, after all, would be unlikely to be in a position to verify the data. Datelines and even places could easily be changed by editors or printers. Folk Dahl notes that the translator of a coranto published on 20 J­ une – a­ ‘word for word translation’ of a Dutch p ­ ublication – h ­ ad changed nine out of eleven dates, presumably to make the news seem fresher than it actually was (Dahl 1953: 8). The early years of the eighteenth century were no different, and foreign news continued to take up significant space in most major newspapers (Black 1987: 197). Neither did the convention of the paragraph change, and it was only in the nineteenth century that priority was shifted to the ‘article’, a discrete story about one event rather than all the news from a certain place.

Conclusion It is difficult to categorically divide the earliest printed news based solely on form. It must be added that for much of the period from 1640 to 1800, most people did not get their news from newsbooks and newspapers, and the form and layout must be considered in context with a whole range of other media, including manuscript news, oral exchange, broadsheets and ballads. Second, it is best not to think of news as ‘evolving’ from one point to another, but rather of an ever-­ changing medium, reactive to external and internal forces. One might look at, say, an early seventeenth-­century title and compare it to one from the end of the eighteenth century and infer that a process of straightforward evolution, from primitive to sophisticated, based on improved technology, press freedom and availability of sources, had taken place. On analysis, the reality is much more complicated. To speak, as earlier news historians did, of corantos being the ‘forerunners’ of the newspaper in some way is to imply that one naturally followed on from the other (Shaaber [1929] 2016). This was not necessarily the case. This is also to ignore the developments in the way in which most researchers now access and work with historical newspaper sources. Much work has been done to computationally analyse the visual

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aspects of nineteenth- and twentieth-­century newspapers, but earlier newspapers have not so far been treated to the same approach. Interacting digitally with historical news sources is very different to looking in archives, because it is separated from its material form (Mussell 2012b; McShane 2017). Working with these digital surrogates changes our relationship to the newspapers. In many computational approaches, the form and content is omitted entirely in favour of the raw textual data. As we have seen, the form and materiality of early modern news greatly impacted the way in which these publications were received by readers, making it crucial that these aspects are not entirely forgotten in the switch to digital.

Case Study 5: Form, Layout and the Digitised Newspaper: Irish News in 1649 Yann Ryan Introduction The purpose of this case study is to show how the physical form and content of early modern news media can be examined with respect to a single topic or ­theme – ­Irish news printed in English newsbooks in 1649. The first significant periodical news printed in Ireland was probably not until 1659 (Munter 1967: 7), but news from Ireland was regularly found in London publications throughout the previous decade. As well as hundreds of single-­topic pamphlets and extensive coverage in more general domestic newsbooks, there were a number of very short-­lived or one-­off serial titles printed in London specifically focused on Irish news. These include, for example, Francis Cole’s A continuation of the diurnall passages in Ireland (E.137[28]), the polemical Mercurius Hybernicus, which is numbered, though just the first issue has survived (88:E.572[25]), and the Irish Monthly Mercury, which had two issues, the second unnumbered.2 Throughout the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1639–53), Irish news was of great interest to the news-­reading public (O’Hara 2003: 179). Following the rebellion in 1641, the Catholic Confederacy took over much of the country, opposed by the royalists under James Butler, 1st Duke of Ormond, who fled to Dublin and regrouped the royalist forces from there. This all took place in the context of a new chapter in the history of the English newspaper, which began, as stated above, with the first parliamentary diurnals in November 1641. In October of the same year Irish Catholics rebelled against and attacked 2

There is some dispute whether these two are a single publication, though the ESTC suggests that they are.

  case study 5 : form, layout, the digitised newspaper 189 Protestant settlers (Durston 1986: 105). Some of the earliest news items were ­reports – ­often ­exaggerated – ­of massacres and atrocities carried out during this time (O’Hara 2003: 183). By 1649 the situation in Ireland was a complicated tangle of factions, peace treaties and political rivalries. Key to the situation were the Confederates, the royalists under Ormond and Baron Inchiquin, the parliamentary forces, the Presbyterian Covenanters and the Ulster army of Owen Roe O’Neill. Ormond made peace with the Confederates in January, eventually fighting against the parliamentary forces led by Oliver Cromwell. Meanwhile, one of the key Catholic Confederate leaders, Owen Roe O’Neill, refused to join the royalist alliance and briefly fought with parliamentary forces, before switching sides and allying with Ormond in 1649. All this intrigue and manoeuvring was covered extensively in English newsbooks.

Form, Layout and Reader Demand The layout of Irish news in these newsbooks can be attributed to a mixture of contingency and response to reader demand. Demand was high, at least according to the publishers. Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer started its issue of 26 June 1649 by claiming that the ‘generall Demand of the people’ was news from Ireland (Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer, 317, 19–26 June 1649, 86:E.561[18]). And it seems to have responded to that demand: it devoted much of its space to Irish news. The same title often referenced Irish news as being the ‘chiefest business’, and wrote an introductory paragraph alerting readers to the fact that they would find more Irish news within, after the parliamentary reports (Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer, 320, 10–17 July 1649, 87:E.565[10]). The Moderate Intelligencer, which in 1649 had a fairly consistent layout, printed Irish news on the first page following the news of Cromwell’s victories in Ireland (Moderate Intelligencer, 237, 27 September–4 October 1649, 88:E.575[10]), as did Perfect Diurnall of 26 March (Perfect Diurnall, 19–26 March 1649, 82:E.529[1]), writing that it would ‘not be amiss’ to start with Irish news, as did Perfect Occurrences of the same date (Perfect Occurrences, 19–26 March 1649, 82:E.529[3]). Irish news was most often marked as coming from Dublin, but also Chester (Moderate Intelligencer, 20–27 September 1649, 88:E.574[27]), Bristol (Perfect Diurnall, 289, 5–12 February 1649, 82:E.527[19]), Milford Haven (Perfect Occurrences, 129, 15–22 June 1649, 82:E.530[44]), Liverpool (Perfect Occurrences, 117, 23–30 March 1649, 82:E.529[3]) or Weymouth (The Moderate, 51, 26 June–3 July 1649, 86:E.562[22]). Though the form of Irish news was mostly in conventional prose paragraphs, there were also tables of information, such as lists of prisoners or troops to be sent to Ireland (Perfect Occurrences, 20–27 April 1649, 82:E.529[21]).

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Figure 7.8  Approximate percentage of lines in London newsbooks dedicated to Irish news, January–October 1649. Data collected by the author from Early English Books Online. Basic quantitative measurements confirm this interest and can help us to understand more about the coverage. As seen in Figure 7.8, news from or about Ireland rose steadily throughout the year (until October, when the Act banning unlicensed news was introduced, making it more difficult to calculate). Little Irish news was published in January and February, as most space was given over to the trial and execution of Charles I. However, as Cromwell’s invasion of Ireland progressed, Irish news again became a dominant topic. Many of the stories are to do with soldiers of the New Model Army either in Ireland or soon to be sent there. This was news that had implications for the news-­reading public, either when local men were pressed for service, or when they were billeted in preparation for departure. In terms of layout, Irish news sat in an unusual, ambiguous position. In one sense, it was like foreign news: it came from overseas, via a small number of routes, at least in comparison to provincial English news (Ryan 2018). Irish news often received its own section which frequently contained several short pieces of news from locations around Ireland (Moderate Intelligencer, 210, 22–29 March 1649, 85:E.548[30]). The pieces were sometimes edited as

  case study 5 : form, layout, the digitised newspaper 191 second-­hand summaries, or presented as unaltered eyewitness accounts in epistolary form. Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer printed, for example, a full letter from Oliver Cromwell regarding the siege of Drogheda (Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer, 331, 2 October 1649, 88:E.575[5]; see also The Moderate, 54, 17–24 July 1649, 87:E.565[23]), while the Moderate carried a letter by the parliamentary commander Michael Jones (57, 7–14 August 1649, 87:E.569[9]).

Assessing Layout in the Digital Age It would be useful to know where within each issue Irish news was reported. This can be difficult when using digitised newspapers as a source. In the British and Irish context, early modern newsbooks have mostly been digitised from microfilm surrogates, chiefly the Burney Collection (Prescott 2018: 54–6) and the Thomason Collection as ‘Early English Books Online’. There is a danger of the physical aspects of the newspaper getting lost through this complex chain from archive to microfilm to digitised image and derived data. In recent years there have been attempts to more fully understand and map this landscape, for example the ‘archaeological’ examination of digitised newspapers by Paul Fyfe (2016), the ‘Atlas’ made by the ‘Digging into Data’ project, Oceanic Exchanges (Beals and Bell 2020), or work to measure the accuracy of the OCR in the Burney Collection (Tanner, Muñoz and Ros 2009). Much of the focus, though, has been on nineteenth-­century news (for example, Mussell 2012a: 69–113). Most newspaper digitisation projects working on nineteenth-­century texts use a format called METS/ALTO, which is a way of encoding the digitised newspaper with information about segmentation and the position of words on the page (see ‘ALTO: Technical Metadata for Layout and Text Objects’ n.d.). This standard records the physical position of each word on the page and this allows for the text to be reproduced as it originally appeared. Using this information, studies have reincorporated the material and visual aspects of the newspaper into data-­driven studies. Projects such as ‘Newspaper Navigator’ enable the analysis of the format and layout of the physical newspaper at scale, by developing a ’visual content recognition model to recognise different elements of nineteenth-­century newspapers’ (Lee 2020; Lee et al. 2020). Other projects have looked specifically at illustrations, using AI to extract, analyse and describe illustrations (Fyfe and Ge 2018; Wevers and Smits 2019).

Using Transcriptions to Visualise the Structure of the Newsbook Less of this work has been done with early modern news. The Early Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) contains data on the physical form which has, in recent

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years, been mined at scale (Lahti et al. 2019; Hill and Hengchen 2019). A number of openly available datasets exist, including the Lancaster corpus (Thomason 2005) and the Thomason Newsbooks (Braddick et al. 2020). Despite not containing page coordinates, one can use this data to analyse the physical layout of the texts. One way to do this is to count the number of times a given word or group of words appears on each page and line of the transcription, creating a ‘heatmap’ of words on a page. The results of running this process on a set of keywords relating to Irish news are shown in Figure 7.9, with eight- and sixteen-­page publications visualised separately. What this shows is that Irish-­related news tended to be printed on the back page, and, surprisingly, less news about Ireland appeared on the front page. Printing Irish news on the final page made it accessible (the back page being easy to read without opening the book), and, perhaps most importantly, it could be added after the rest of the week’s news had been set. This was made explicitly clear by the editors, who often commented that they received the news at the last minute. News at the bottom of the last page tended to be particularly late, often containing rumour or uncertain news that had just arrived: A Letter was read from the chief Governor of Ireland, of a late date: Dublin and Tredaugh [Drogheda] are said to have lately made two desperate sallies, in which they took many of the Enemy, and relieved themselves both with Ammunition and Provision. (The Moderate, 53, 10–17 July 1649, 87:E.565[11]) In contrast, news on the middle pages more often tended to be verified, eyewitness accounts from figures of authority, such as the aforementioned letters by Michael Jones and Oliver Cromwell. Looking at the layout over time also produces some interesting results. In Figure 7.10, the results for the same range of keywords are charted per page, again divided between eight- and sixteen-­page publications. Looking at the sixteen-­page publications, there is a significant increase in the quantity of Irish keywords in June and August, but they have different patterns. In June the keywords are more likely to appear in the middle ­pages – u ­ sually more certain news, or extended ­letters – ­whereas by August, when events were more crucial and up-­to-­date news was more important, they tend to appear on the final page, where news close to publication was added. These reports tend to be more likely to be rumour or uncertain news, and often marked as such.

Conclusions When quantitative methods are carefully used alongside traditional historical digging, they can help to provide new insights or confirm historical hunches.

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Chapter Eight

THE EVOLVING LANGUAGE OF THE PRESS Nicholas Brownlees and Birte Bös

Introduction This chapter will examine features of the language of periodical print news as it transformed from the short pamphlets of the 1640s to the ever more heterogeneous British and Irish newspapers of the eighteenth century. The chapter is divided into two historical periods which encapsulate important changes not only in the history of the press but in the language that made up the news publications of the time. The first period from 1640 to 1695 includes the last series of foreign-­ news corantos, the huge outpouring of news pamphlets in the 1640s and 1650s, and the founding in 1665 of the Oxford Gazette, which became the London Gazette in 1666. Excepting the years from 1679 to 1682, the London Gazette had an effective monopoly of serialised news up until 1688, and even after that it remained the principal news publication until the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695 (Handover 1965: 9–23; Nelson and Seccombe 2002: 545–9; Suhr 2021). On account of its focus on both foreign and domestic news, regular periodicity and, in particular, its one-­sheet, two-­column folio format, the London Gazette is often considered England’s first newspaper (Williams 2010: 53; Conboy 2010: 33). It is no coincidence that in the Oxford English Dictionary the first reported occurrence of the term ‘newspaper’ is dated 1667. The second period in the chapter, running from 1695 until 1800, witnessed an ever-­increasing number of newspapers published both in and beyond London, a significant increase in the diversity of a newspaper’s contents and text types, and a greater ideological positioning in the form of editorials and letters to the editor. The chapter will also include an examination of linguistic features of advertisements 195

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as they became an ever more prominent feature in British and Irish newspapers.

1640–95 The first two decades of this period not only overturned politics and society, but also the press and the language of news. The ‘explosion’ in press activity during the first two Civil Wars (1642–49) and much of the Interregnum led to an extraordinary richness and variety in news content, presentation and discourse (Raymond 2003: 202–75; 2011; Peacey 2004b: 237–71; 2012; Brownlees 2011: 97–161). From a linguistic viewpoint, no other decades in the history of the English press have brought about such a range of styles, rhetoric and inventive creativity. Yet despite this, it is also true that the language and presentational format of the news in the Oxford Gazette in 1665, and up to the early eighteenth century, would have been instantly recognisable to a news reader in 1640 before the outbreak of the Civil War. It is what happened following the onset of the Civil War and in the 1650s that was so momentous. The 1640s opened with the intermittent publication of corantos in London. Although the writing of corantos in the early 1620s had shown some interesting editorial intervention and flair, by 1640 the principal printer, the ever more impecunious Nathaniel Butter, was simply translating news dispatches previously printed in the continental press, and in particular in a Dutch coranto published by Jan van Hilten (Boys 2011: 124–42; Dahl 1952: 242–4). One such news bulletin, which was typical in its brevity, is the following of 10 April 1640: [1] Leipzig the 8.18 of March. We feare, that we shall have againe great trouble, in those parts, because Generall Bannier is passed the River of Elve at Leutmaritz with his whole Army, and the Imperiall Army is likewise gone back again towards Prague to passe there the River of Elve and to follow Generall Bannier, it seemest, that Bannier aimes at Freyburg. (The Curranto for this weeke from Norimberg) For the most part news translations of the time conformed closely to the original source text, with little or no editorial intervention or glossing (see Chapter 16). This meant that the brief news items, which were characterised by proper nouns and packed information, had neither analysis nor ‘engagement with readers in dialogue’ (Boys 2011: 165). Such an approach was justified on grounds of impartiality. News translators, and their publishers, usually wished to be considered providers

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the evolving language of the press 197 not interpreters of news. The editor cum translator clearly set out this position in a coranto of 1625: ‘I will doe [the translation] sincerely without any addition or diminution, as I doe other things, leauing the construction and censure of them to the Reader’ (The Continuation of our Weekly News, 1 February 1625). The close adherence to the source text affected issues of authorial identity as reflected in the use of personal pronouns such as we in [1]. The first-­person plural pronoun does not refer to the editor or printer of the English publication but rather to the original foreign writer of that news dispatch. If we now compare the language of [1] with [2] and [3] ­below – ­respectively foreign and domestic news ­items – ­in the second issue of the Oxford Gazette, we see important similarities. [2] Hague, Nov. 17. The Sr. Lessyn, Envoy from the K. of France to the Bishop of Munster is arrived here; of his errand thither, we have no more, but that he hath offered the Bishop his Masters mediation with the States, for an agreement between them. (Oxford Gazette, 16–20 November 1665) [3] Weymouth, Nov. 14. Last week a Frenchman laden with Salt, bound for Exon, was forc’d into this Harbour by some Privateers: the commodity was welcome, and finding the Market for his purpose, made sale here. (Oxford Gazette, 16–20 November 1665) Again the news items are short, again the focus is on facts and information; there is an underlying factuality which in the early modern period reinforced the credibility of the news (Randall 2008a: 108; Shapiro 2000: 3–4). But there is no interaction with the reader. The first-­plural personal pronoun we in [2] and the deictic expression of place here in [3] once more exclusively regard the original news writer and their own specific community. This was how much of print news was communicated in corantos (1620–41) and in the post-­Restoration press, whether in translations of foreign news or in domestic news: simple news dispatches, consisting of a paragraph or little more, preceded by a dateline, and with no editorial voice. This was found not only in corantos and the London Gazette but also in Mercurius Hibernicus; or the Irish Intelligencer, a fifteen-­week Irish periodical published in Dublin in 1663 (Munter 1967: 7–8; see Kenny, this volume). Although much of the space in the fifteen extant issues is devoted to the daily proceedings of the Court of Claims, the publication also included English and foreign news items presented in the above standard way.

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The news writing in the 1640s and 1650s was very different, at least in those newsbooks embroiled in the pamphlet wars. Mercurius Aulicus (1643–45) and Mercurius Britanicus (1643–46), the pre-­ eminent newsbooks of the royalists and parliamentarians in the first years of the Civil War, contained a totally different kind of news language that involved highly politicised editorial opinion and comment, a ­willingness – e­ ven ­delight – ­in playing with language and textual convention, and a whole range of rhetorical structures designed to promote their cause whether it be the king’s or that of his adversaries (Peacey 2004b: 189–91; Brownlees 2006b; Cecconi 2019a). Regarding editorial voice, we see this most immediately in the use of the first-­person pronouns both singular and plural. Unlike [1] and [2] above, in Britanicus the first-­person singular pronoun such as in [4] and [5] very often refers back to the editor, that is, the writer composing the news for the benefit of his readers. [4] The newes from Court this week is various, but I shall give you some particulars you may relie on. (Mercurius Britanicus, 12–19 September 1643) [5] Now I arrive at the affairs of the Kingdom, and I shall make it my designe to advance our own with truth, as I have declined theirs with their errors. (Mercurius Britanicus, 10–17 June 1644) An example of we is instead found in [6] where Marchamont Nedham, the editor of Britanicus, is narrating the victory of the Covenanters and parliamentarian army at Marston Moor. Unlike the examples in the coranto [1] and Oxford Gazette [2], the first-­person plural pronoun is inclusive of the reader. The we incorporates not just the editor describing the battle but also the reader and all others supporting the parliamentarian cause. [6] we routed them wholly, killed and tooke their chiefe Officers, and most part of their Standards. After which we set upon the Reare of their foot, and with the assistance of our maine battell which all this time stood firm, we put them wholly to the rout, killed many, and tooke their Officers, and Colours, and by this time we had no enemy in the Field. (Mercurius Britanicus, Monday 8–15 July 1644) What distinguishes Aulicus and Britanicus is the amount of space each newsbook devoted to attacking adversarial news. Their ways of doing this were numerous but included invective, satire, scurrility, rant and animadversion. This latter rhetorical strategy, which involved

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the evolving language of the press 199 the reporting and successive rebuttal of the adversary’s viewpoint and information, was common to other text genres, such as religious polemic, but not to serialised news (Raymond 2003: 211–14). As both Aulicus and Britanicus relied more on soundbites than profound argumentation, the animadversion was simply structured and easily understood. Much of it included irony, as seen below in Aulicus’s reporting and rebuttal of Mercurius Britanicus’s news. John Berkenhead, the editor or at least principal ‘scribe’ of the royalist newsbook (Peacey 2012: 260), first cites the parliamentarian news and then after a colon [7] and in brackets [8] makes his ironic riposte. [7] That in the late Northerne fight the Scots slew a Thousand English, most of them seemed to be Gentlemen, by their white hands, short nayles, and curled long haire: This Lye was made by Brethren that have short haire and long nayles. (Mercurius Aulicus, 31 March–6 April 1644) [8] That a Partee of Horse under the command of Colonell Urrey came to Dunstable, and with a long knife kill’d the Minister in the Pulpit, (’Twas a pretty long knife, for the Colonell was then in Lancashire.) (Mercurius Aulicus, 23–9 June 1644) Britanicus’s animadversion was largely similar in structure but carried a more personal tone in that it frequently addressed the royalist newsbook directly (‘Aulicus hold your Peace, we are all friends against Oxford’) (26 August–2 September 1644); ‘Nay, Aulicus, thou wilt be meaner now every day then other’ (8–15 July 1644). This process of personalisation is an early example of a frequent modern-­day news ploy aimed at simplifying events and making the complex dynamics of history intelligible (Keeble 1998: 98). Both Berkenhead and Nedham were exceptionally gifted news writers and e­ ditors – ­with titles that were revived later in the 1640s by other editors (see Figure 8.1) – but it was Nedham who not only outlasted the first Aulicus but went on to consolidate his position and finances in the Interregnum, becoming its most influential newsman (Pettegree 2014: 302; Raymond 2004). In the 1650s Nedham edited Mercurius Politicus (1650–60), the principal newsbook of the decade, its partner journal the Publick Intelligencer (1665–60), as well as the Publick Adviser (1657), a weekly consisting entirely of advertisements. In Mercurius Politicus Nedham displayed his full talents as editorialist, polemicist and expert provider of top-­quality news. His forty-­ four editorials on classical republicanism, published in Mercurius Politicus from 1651 to 1652, have been described by Raymond as ‘an

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Figure 8.1  Mercurius Aulicus, 10–17 February 1648 (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin)

extraordinary moment in the history of Journalism’ (1998a: 9), while much of his mocking, ribald polemic is energised by vigorous, entertaining imagery. His good contacts in government and Parliament, which improved still further when John Thurloe was appointed Secretary of State in 1652, meant that for foreign news he did not just have to rely on translated news published elsewhere but could access and print news from other sources, which were passed to him through his contacts (Raymond 1998a: 9, 14; Peacey 2012: 261). These different news sources, and the texts they supplied, need to be considered when assessing the language of some of the news material in Mercurius Politicus. For example, in the narration of the battle of Leghorn, which took place in March 1653 between an English and a Dutch naval squadron off the Tuscan coast, the story is told from multiple angles, making use of numerous text types, each one comprising its own specific stylistic features. The text types included a short, highly dramatic report in a last-­minute express squeezed in on the last page of the issue, a first-­person blow-­by-­blow description written by

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the evolving language of the press 201 one of the combatants, a legalistic justification for the events leading up to the battle, further third-­person dramatic narrative supplied by ‘Joint-­actors’, the translation of a paragraph in a Dutch newspaper, excerpts of diplomatic dispatches from England’s agent in Leghorn, brief dispatches related from ships anchored off the Italian peninsula, and a long narration of the battle itself (see Brownlees 2011: 137–61). Nedham was also adept at exploiting the possibilities of advertising. Together with early 1650s newsbooks such as the Faithful Scout, Mercurius Politicus carried ‘Advertisements’, a header that in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries referred not just to commercial notices but also to public and private announcements (Walker 1973: 113; Nevitt 2017). These assorted texts were willingly printed by newsbook proprietors since they could charge a substantial fee for their insertion (Nevitt 2017: 220–3). The private announcements, the classifieds of the day, included Lost and Founds. These had a standard structure whereby the first part of the text provided extensive details about the lost property while the second part contained information about the reward leading to its recovery. A Pearl Necklace being one Rope, with a black twopenny Ribbin at either end, in a white woollen Box, writ thereupon three Doss of Pearl, lost betwixt York and Wetherby, about the 17th of Jan. last. If any one shall finde the same, and deliver it at Wetherby to Mr. Will: Tomson, at the sign of the Crown there, or at London to Mr. Bernard Morden Merchant, at his House in great Woodstreet, he shall have three pounds for his pains. (The Perfect Diurnall of Some Passages and Proceedings, 1 May 1654) This set structure quickly lent itself to parody, as seen below, where John Crouch exploited the textual conventions of Lost and Founds for humorous and salacious purposes in this fictitious announcement in his mock newsbook Mercurius Fumigosus. If there be any man or Woman in Citie or Countrey, that hath lately taken up a Red Petticoate, with two silver Laces round, and a Holland Smock, button’d down before with white loops, and a spot double guilt in the meridian behinde, being taken up about shearstreet, neer to Pentell-Barre, let him bring word to the CRYER, and he have three kicks on the arse, two fillips on the Nose, and be counted but a Widggen for his paines. (Mercurius Fumigosus, 20–7 September 1654)

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Nedham’s parliamentarian newsbooks were published in London and primarily written for English readers, but the 1640s and 1650s also saw newsbooks which from their titles at least focused on news about Wales, Scotland and Ireland. The only self-­titled Welsh publication was the Welch Mercury (1643–44), which although short-­lived is nevertheless interesting from a sociolinguistic point of view. Presenting itself as a Welsh newsbook written in Wales in Welsh English and then sent up to London, it was in fact a mocking English portrayal of the Welsh, and in particular their use, or misuse, of the English language. The nine issues contained some news, but their chief purpose was to create ‘honest Mirth’, at least for the English reader, based on the pamphlets’ mock Welsh English and simple negative stereotyping of Welsh culture and people (Raymond 2003: 220–2; Brownlees 2009). The two important 1640s and 1650s newsbooks for Scottish news had instead an informative purpose. The historical relevance of Mercurius Scoticus (1651–52) lies in its being the first newsbook to be published north of the border (Nelson and Seccombe 2002: 543; Spurlock 2011: 200). However, it is the other self-­proclaimed Scottish newsbook, the London-­printed Scotish Dove, that is more interesting from a visual and linguistic point of view. What stands out visually in the publication is the very striking woodcut on the title page of a dove bearing an olive branch. As printed images were few and expensive, we can presume that it would have attracted a potential reader’s attention (Raymond 1996: 35). In 1644 and 1645 the woodcut was also frequently accompanied by simple rhyming couplets generally narrating recent events and religious homilies. The doggerel verse, which is also found in other London-­printed newsbooks of the 1640s such as Mercurius Civicus, likewise heads the news on the title page of the one known number of the Irish Monthly Mercury (1649–50) (see Munter 1967: 6). Published in Cork, though with a clear pro-­English message, the eulogistic prose narration of Cromwell’s campaign progress is complemented by undemanding verse that was probably meant to appeal to readers conversant with the simple broadside ballads that were also in rhyme. It was certainly a very different kind of text from what appeared in the London Gazette, the newspaper of record.

1695–1800 The lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695 triggered an unprecedented diversification of the press. In the capital, the London Gazette was soon rivalled by tri-­weeklies such as the Post Boy, With Foreign and

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the evolving language of the press 203 Domestick News, the Post Man, And the Historical Account, &c. and the Flying-Post: or, the Post-Master, followed by the first daily newspaper, the Daily Courant, in 1702. While London was clearly the most important centre of news printing with a mushrooming number of newspapers, which amounted to fifty-­two by the end of the eighteenth century, the first English provincial newspapers started to appear in Norwich (1701) and Bristol (?1702), and their number continually increased to about fifty in 1780. Scotland and Ireland already had their first regular newspapers as well, with the Edinburgh Gazette, founded in 1699, and the Dublin Intelligence, first published 1690–3 (see Fries 2015: 58–62; Schneider 2002: 19). Towards the end of the eighteenth century the number of newspapers had risen to nine in Scotland and fourteen in Dublin, enriched by an emerging Irish provincial press, all increasingly catering for the needs of their local audiences (see Barnard, this volume; Benchimol 2019; Munter 1967: 15). In Wales, however, the ‘first home-­grown newspaper’ only became available at the beginning of the nineteenth century (Williams 2010: 49). Yet new ventures were massively restricted when the first of a series of Stamp Acts was passed in 1712, which substantially shaped the development of the press until the duty imposed on newspapers was finally abolished in the mid-­nineteenth century. The Stamp Acts not only rendered many newspapers very short-­lived, they also influenced the format, volume and composition of newspapers, as publishers sought to take advantage of some early loopholes in the legislation. Newspapers increased first the number of pages from four to six and later the size of the sheets, and crammed in more news and a larger variety of content by reducing the type size and increasing the number of columns (see Schneider 2002: 20–1). By the end of the eighteenth century newspapers included not just foreign and domestic news and an increasing percentage of advertisements and announcements which financed the papers, but also opinion pieces such as political essays and letters to the editor, service information such as price lists and lottery results, and literary texts such as book instalments, poems (see Figure 8.2) and songs (Fries 2015: 66–81). Step by step, newspapers thus developed into the multi-­text conglomerates familiar to modern readers (see Figure 8.3). Looking at the news content in those early days of the newspaper, we need to be aware that much of what the readers were given was essentially ‘more of the same’ (Black 1992: 13–14). For most of the eighteenth century foreign news was translated faithfully from continental newspapers, with politically motivated changes remaining relatively rare (Brownlees 2018). Both foreign and domestic news was copied

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Figure 8.2  Poetry was regularly included in newspapers: in Faulkner’s Dublin Journal of 4–7 July 1741 a poem ‘From a young Lady to Admiral Vernon’ takes up half the middle column (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin)

unashamedly not only among London papers, but also by the provincial press and the early Scottish and Irish newspapers (Hutchison 2008: 56; Munter 1967: 14). This is illustrated below from the first issue of the Caledonian Mercury, which presented various news items lifted from the London Gazette, followed by further extracts from other newspapers, under the

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Figure 8.3  The multi-text characteristic of many eighteenth-century newspapers is reflected in titles such as the Universal Journalist, 4 November 1768 (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin)

heading An Account of NEWS, &c. The news item copied word for word from the London Gazette still features the deictic place references (here, ll. 4, 15) pointing to the Dutch city as the original place of events and news writing. Likewise, the temporal reference some Days ago (l. 11) is quite vague, particularly as the reader additionally had to consider different points of reference, that is, the different publication dates of

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the Caledonian Mercury and the London Gazette and the date of the original Dutch source. This task was rendered even more complex by the different calendars in continental Europe and Britain, still in use in the first half of the eighteenth century (on space and time references in early news, see also Claridge 2015). An Account of NEWS, &c. From the London Gazette. April 23. Hague, April 30. The Count de Rechterian is arrived here, to solicit on the behalf of his Brother, that the Sentence given by the Council of State against him and the Field-­Officers of the Garison of Tourney, may if possible be reversed or at least mitigated, alledging that they have been treated with too much Rigour. Count Staremberg, who is appointed Envoy Extraordinary from the Emperor to the Court of Great Britain, is daily expected here: The William and Mary Yacht which is to carry him over, arrived some Days ago at Rotterdam. Prince William of Hesse Cassel, Governor of Breda, is set out from thence for Stockholm, in order to be present at the Coronation of the King his Brother, which is to be performed at Upsal next Month. M. Preiss, the Swedish Minister here, has notified in form to the States General, the King his Master’s Accession to the Crown. (Caledonian Mercury, 28 April 1720) While news items were often arranged chronologically in the order they arrived at the paper, it is interesting that in this issue of the Caledonian Mercury, the two pieces copied from the London Gazette are presented in reverse sequence, giving particular prominence to the news from the Hague, reinforced by the eye-­catching illustrated capital initial (see also Ryan, this volume, on the rhetorical effects of visual presentation). However, newspapers did not always frame their news and label their sources as clearly as in this example from the Caledonian Mercury. Furthermore, the random order and the fact that news bulletins usually remained unchecked and would occasionally even contradict one another did not always make it easy for readers to follow the events (see Williams 2010: 62, 67). The Northampton Mercury openly acknowledged this problem on 13 March 1721 when it hoped its ‘candid readers will not condemn our Mercury for the many falsities that have of late been inserted therein, as we took them all out of the London Printed papers, and those too the most creditable’. As text reuse was widespread and accepted, many of the linguistic characteristics of early newspapers are bound to be similar. One of the practices that was quite common throughout the eighteenth century,

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the evolving language of the press 207 but was abandoned in the early nineteenth century, was the use of framing devices which provide reference to the information process and indicate epistemic stance (Bös 2015a: 135–6). The passage below shows some extracts from a typical random selection of brief news items published under the heading LONDON in the Penny London Post of April 1752. All in all, the short section of 2,070 words contains four instances of the most prominent formulaic pattern we hear and some variations including other verbs such as inform and learn. We hear that the Right Hon. the Lord North and Guildford will soon be created an Earl . . . We are informed that a real Estate of 12000l. a Year in Ireland devolves to the Right Hon. the Lord Kerry by the Death of the Earl of Shelburn . . . From the Hague we learn, that the Commercial Difference of the Province of Holland, with that of Zealand, is in a fair Way of Adjustment, their East India Stocks however mount up . . . We are credibly informed that a Captain of a Man of War, a Prisoner for Debt within the Rules of the King’s Bench, was indicted on Thursday last at Rygate in the County of Surry, for stealing two China Punch Bowls . . . (Penny London Post, 19–22 April 1752) In the report the first-­person pronoun we represents the authorial voice of the newspaper, yet, as in the seventeenth-­century news publications, this was not always the case. Just as with the time and place references mentioned above, first-­person references often related to the original news sources and their communicators, but there are also fuzzy instances, where it remains unclear who is referred to by deictic we or I. In many cases, first-­person pronouns are remnants of the correspondence style that featured prominently in early newspapers, which simply inserted the letters they received from their correspondents all over the world without any changes in linguistic form, ­often – ­though not a­ lways – l­abelling them with the formula ‘extract of a letter from [place, date]’: Extract of a letter from Calcutta, Jan. 15. 1781. We are as yet totally ignorant of the good or ill effects of the treaty, most humbly submitted by Mr. Hastings to the Marattas in October last, by which all our boasted acquisitions in Guzzerat were to be ­restored . . . ­Two French privateers are off Ganjam,

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where they have taken several vessels, and command the Boy, for we have not a ship of force on this side Cape Comerin; and of Sir Edward Hughes and his fleet we have no tidings. (London Evening Post, 10–12 January 1782) While first-­person plural pronouns were clearly more frequent, there is also evidence of first-­person singular perspectives, as illustrated in [9]. In this communicative constellation, the correspondent (‘I ’) turns to the editor (‘you’). However, as the letters were made public verbatim (and regular correspondents obviously knew this), examples like these can also be considered as cases of multiple address, the circle of addressees extending to the readership of the paper (Bös 2015a: 137). In contrast, readers are addressed directly in [10]. [9] Extract of a letter from Annapolis, Nov. 24. In my last I advised you of a vessel being arrived here from London, having tea on board. You will see the fate of it in the news-­ papers . . . (Morning Post, 2 January 1775) [10] Last night several Gentleman of this Country, who were in Riga, obtained leave of the Governour and of the Saxons to come out with their effects, and upon their arrival, we shall be able to give you a better account of the place . . . (Post Man, 13–16 April 1700) While reader involvement via direct address is a feature typically associated with the popular press of the twentieth century, our examples illustrate that such traces of personalisation could already be found in the early days of the newspaper. The editor’s voice featured particularly prominently in inaugural comments. As shown in the following editorial comment from the Daily Gazetteer, they were soon perceived as an indispensable element in the first issues of newspapers and fulfilled not just basic informational needs, for example stating publication days, price and delivery conditions, but also important interpersonal functions, with editors positioning themselves and their papers, and thereby establishing a connection with their envisioned target audience. The INTRODUCTION THE good Understanding which is necessary to be kept up between Authors and Readers, hath established a fashionable Correspondence between them, and made it natural to introduce a New Paper with such Accounts of the Design, and of the Persons who undertake it, as may at once gratify every Man’s Curiosity,

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the evolving language of the press 209 and interest him in the Success of the Undertaking . . . (Daily Gazetteer, 30 June 1735) As more and more newspapers seemed ‘to have overstock’d the Town and glutted the Country’ (General Post, 19 July 1711), editors also found it necessary to emphasise the advantages of the paper at hand over its competitors, promising a more comprehensive news coverage, ‘a better model’ (Grub-Street Journal, 8 January 1730) and more professional style of news presentation (Bös 2017). This and further editorial metadiscourse thus provides interesting insights into early journalistic ideals. The passage below displays the envisioned practices of the Daily Courant, England’s first daily newspaper, as outlined in its first issue. [the editor will] give his Extracts fairly and Impartially; at the beginning of each Article he will quote the Foreign Paper from whence ’tis taken, that the Publick, seeing from what Country a piece of News comes with the Allowance of that Government, may be better able to Judge of the Credibility and Fairness of the Relation: Nor will he take upon him to give any Comments or Conjectures of his own, but will relate only Matter of Fact; supposing other People to have Sense enough to make Reflections for themselves. (Daily Courant, 11 March 1702) While there was also evidence of other approaches, favouring ‘critical Observations’ as part of ‘a proper method’ (as, for example, suggested in the inaugural comment of the Grub-Street Journal), most of these comments promoted the absence of bias and an emphasis on facts, credibility and evidence in news reporting. Indeed, the labels impartial/impartiality and true/truth featured prominently not just in inaugural comments, but in early news discourse in general (see Bös 2015b; 2017: 24), and were even highlighted in the mastheads of some papers (see Plate 5). Yet despite their strong emphasis on impartiality, early newspapers did not quite live up to their ideals. Micro-­linguistic investigations of markers of emotivity, evidentiality and reliability indicate that early newspapers were often more partial and less factual than they claimed (Bös 2015b). The passage below from the Flying Post (which was probably bribed into loyalty; see Clarke 2010: 50) sides with the king in the diplomatic vicissitudes over the Northern Treaties. The extract is emotionally highly charged, intensely evaluative and clearly does not leave the formation of public opinion to coffee house conversations, where clients pored over and discussed the news of the day.

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THE Memorial presented to the King, by the Czar’s Minister, in December last, was so very impudent, and full of Falshoods, as has been already shewn in this and other Papers, that we may justly say, it seems to be a good Judgment of God upon our Jacobites and their Adherents, that they are given up to the grossest of Perjury and Lyes; a certain Sign of a bad Cause which stands in need of such vile Methods to carry it on. (Flying Post, 25–27 February 1720) However, particularly with less favourable views and political stances, opinions were often not expressed in an authorial voice, but attributed to others; for example, fabricated letters to the editor avoided responsibility and with that potential censorship and prosecution (see Bös 2015b: 58). That readers were not just interested in getting the news in a ‘raw format’, but keen on analysis and commentary is proved by the popularity of newspapers such as Mist’s Weekly Journal, whose editor, Nathaniel Mist, took a substantial personal risk in providing ‘a highly personal dialogue between politics and his own interpretations of them for his readers’ (Conboy 2010: 44). The review format had already been cultivated in the first decade of the eighteenth century, when political, social and literary essays gained prominence with papers such as Daniel Defoe’s Review (1704), a Scottish edition of which was set up in 1709, Richard Steele’s Tatler (1709), Jonathan Swift’s Examiner (1710) and Joseph Addison’s Spectator (1711). Featuring a colourful array of fictitious personae, for example Defoe’s Scandal Club, Mr Spectator and the esteemed members of his Spectator Club, and Isaac Bickerstaff, the fictitious editor of the Tatler, these papers had found sophisticated and entertaining ways of letting readers know ‘what to think’ on a broad range of subjects, and thus substantially influenced the genres and styles of later newspapers (Clarke 2010: 58; see also Conboy 2010: 38–40). In the 1730s further novel publications entered the scene, one of the most prominent and long-­lived being the Gentleman’s Magazine. Under his pen name Sylvanus Urban, its editor Edward Cave conceptualised the paper as a sort of ‘warehouse’, ‘a Monthly Collection to treasure up, as in a Magazine, the most remarkable Pieces’ on a range of general interest subjects, thus promoting the term magazine in the sense of a periodical publication (OED, s.v. magazine, senses I 1.a and III 6.b) and again employing the practice of extensive text reuse. Aimed at a broad readership particularly in the provinces, the Gentleman’s Magazine offered a reasonably priced digest of accurately cited extracts from the London papers, with a particular zest for

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the evolving language of the press 211 verifiable scientific and medical observations, and it also included new genres such as the book review, here usually taking the form of advertisements (Taavitsainen 2015: 145, 150; see also Clarke 2010: 86). While advertisements had already been established in the early days of the London Gazette, they gained increasing importance in the first decades of the eighteenth century. The Daily Advertiser, which like the Gentleman’s Magazine was launched in 1731, is considered the first newspaper which was entirely financed by advertising. Initially, advertisements contained little of the linguistic hyperbole and rhetorical flourishes that in the eighteenth century came to be associated with advertising discourse. Many of the advertisements related to books, and in their dry, informative language repeated, often word for word, the information on the volume’s title page (Ferdinand 1999: 163). This kind of language, in its focus on information and facts, was not dissimilar from the content-­led language in the news bulletins in the rest of the newspapers. The advertisements that led the language of advertising in a new direction were related to medical services and cures. On occasion, and this is particularly found in the Irish press, the promotional language only contains slight hyperbole. For example, in Dublin’s Post-Man and The Historical Account (28 August 1710) we read that ‘E. Playn from ­London . . . ­putteth in Artificial Teeth so neatly, that they cannot be distinguished from Natural ones; and Teeth that are black and ill coloured, are clean’d and polished’. Likewise in Figure 8.4 (an advertisement with woodcut), Doctor Hunter’s medical expertise is corroborated by certification rather than solely by empty rhetoric: Doctor Hunter celebrated for the cure of Deafness, in old or young, is just returned from Limerick, and lodges at Mrs. Meagher’s on the Coal quay. He proposes staying there a short time. He has last Wednesday cured Mr Stephen Upton’s wife and daughter at Rathclare, which will appear by a certificate he has to produce. (The Hibernian Chronicle, 2 January 1772) In the English press, where the nascent consumption society could provide rich earnings for successful, nationally sold medicines, many medical ads contained much more of the rhetorical hyperbole associated with quackery (Fries 1997). The use of superlatives and highly positive evaluative adjectives is typical of the genre (Görlach 2002: 92–5; Gotti 2005: 31–2; auf dem Keller 2004: 89–91). However, research by Barbara Benedict notes some gender-­related rhetorical and stylistic differences, as, unlike many male advertisers, women seemed to ‘eschew literary rhetoric, especially satire’ perhaps because

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Figure 8.4  The Hibernian Chronicle, 2 January 1772 (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin)

‘its aggressiveness and irony can easily turn on the speaker, and women make more vulnerable targets than men’ (2018: 414). One of the best-­selling medicines throughout the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was ‘Dr Daffey’s Elixir Salutis’. Not only was the book describing the medicine regularly published (see Plate 6) but its cure was frequently advertised in the press. The following advertisement in the long running and successful Ipswich Journal (3 June 1721) was typical of the language and content: ‘Dr Daffey’s Famous Cordial Elixir Salutis, The Great Preserver of Mankind, above 60 Years experienced, and a certain cure (under God) in the several Distempers following, viz. The Gout and Rheumatism, with all those torturing Pains attending them’. The fact that Dr Daffey’s medicine had a Latin name was not coincidental, since many medical advertisements of the time exploited the prestige of the language to enhance their product (Sairio and Palander-­ Collin 2012: 632; Percy 2012: 199). Addison made fun of this practice by including the absurdly hyperbolic ‘Remedium efficax et universum’ in a mock miracle cure that he published in the

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the evolving language of the press 213 Spectator (27 November 1712). This exploitation of genre conventions provides further evidence of editorial creativity in shaping the linguistic practices of a young medium. Such editorial inventiveness is also seen in the radical press at the end of the century (Conboy 2010: 55–60). One of the best-­known radical publications was Daniel Isaac Eaton’s Politics for the People (1793– 95), which ‘drifted in a publishing hinterland somewhere between a commonplace book, a periodical, an anthology and a political journal’ (Wood 2009: 839). Taking its cue from Thomas Paine’s banned but hugely popular The Rights of Man (1791–92), the weekly radical publication often adopts a very oral tone in its writings that is reminiscent of the kind of orality exploited in the Civil War propaganda periodicals such as Mercurius Aulicus and Mercurius Britanicus. Here below it parodies the thought and speech patterns of a presumed aristocrat in his defence of the raising of taxes to fund the war against the French. In satirising the aristocrat’s casual contempt for the poor and his lofty ignorance of their very real deprivations, he employs elements of free indirect thought that are as dramatic as they are provocative. To the Editor of POLITICS for the PEOPLE. Mr. EDITOR, HUM! Sixteen hundred thousand pounds for thirty thousand men! ­Reasonable – ­very reasonable. Cheap, very cheap. Bull hides would have cost as much almost.   That we may keep our plighted faith, and pay this subsidy, fresh taxes must be raised. – Let me consider. What articles of luxury have we that are not already taxed? Straw for thatching; – Corn for flour; – Flour for bread; Bread for food; – Butcher’s meat; Potatoes, and all the efeulent vegetables. Then a duty on all cottage windows which have not shutters on them, and those with shutters to be closed at six o’clock in the evening during winter, and eight during summer, that our candle revenue may not be eluded by the swinish multitude enjoying themselves over their luxurious repasts by moonlight. O what glorious, and never to be exhausted, resources are open to the view of a y­ oung – ­bold – intrepid – patriotic – financier!   With such an addition to our armies, we shall certainly enact wonders. Hum! Ha! . . . (1 April 1794)

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Conclusion It is unquestionable that the language of the periodical press evolved over the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; what are more debatable are not just the reasons for such changes but whether chronologically speaking this evolution was entirely linear or instead temporally jagged. In 1640, the starting point of our analysis, the language was mostly uniform in its impersonal factuality. The press was based around foreign-­news corantos which had been translated into English. As the original news publications were factual and impersonal, so too were the closely translated English versions. This uniformity of language changed with the onset of the English Civil Wars when, first, the easing of censorship restrictions and, secondly, the emergence of newsbook propaganda led to news partisanship, satire and invective in some areas of the press. However, this rhetorical evolution did not survive the Restoration as is clearly seen in the matter-­of-­fact language that makes up most of the London Gazette, which dominated the English news scene for much of the thirty years following its founding in 1665. Government control over the press loosened following the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695, but paradoxically it was the Stamp Act of 1712, which was in part designed to increase government control over the press, that led to the most significant evolution in the language of the press. Through a legal loophole, newspaper proprietors realised that if they filled out their newspapers to six pages rather than the normal four they could avoid paying the new heavy tax. But in order to fill the extra two pages they needed to both lengthen the traditional kinds of news reports they already used and also include new kinds of texts. This they did with text types such as reviews, medical and scientific texts, and a greater preponderance of letters to the editor, expressing on occasion marked ideological stances. Clearly, these new text types also introduced new linguistic and rhetorical features. Furthermore, the language of the early press was increasingly shaped by advertisements, whose linguistic make-­up shows a more linear development than editorial content. During the seventeenth century advertisements mostly eschewed the hyperbole that is typically associated with this text type nowadays. This changed in the eighteenth century, particularly in advertisements for medical treatments, where the possibility of making huge profits encouraged the advertiser to give full rein to linguistic excess and exaggeration. In the nineteenth century the increased financial rewards associated with

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case study 6 : the press and the standard accent 215 newspapers and advertising were to further influence the language of the press.

Case Study 6: The Press and the Standard Accent Massimo Sturiale In recent years various scholars have pointed out the role and influence of eighteenth-­ century British newspapers and magazines in accent attitudes, which foregrounded the standard language ideology and its subsequent metalanguage (see, among others, Mugglestone 2003: 38; Agha 2003: 257). The second half of the eighteenth century was especially characterised by a proliferation of pronouncing dictionaries (cf. Mugglestone 2003; see also Beal 1999; 2009; Jones 2006). For example, one could mention, among others, Buchanan (1757), Kenrick (1784), Spence (1775), Perry (1775), Sheridan (1780) and Walker (1791), with Walker actually dominating the scene and destined to be considered the ‘pronunciation bible’, and the ‘undisputed norm’ in matters of pronunciation throughout the nineteenth century. What is more, the stigmatisation of regional features was accompanied by an evaluation of the social status associated with them. See, for instance, the entry for ‘merchant’ as recorded by the two most influential orthoepists of the time, the Irish-­born but London-­based Thomas Sheridan and the English-­born John Walker in Table 8.1. Walker encourages his readers to favour one variant over the other, in order to avoid the risk of sounding ‘gross and vulgar’ and being associated with ‘the lower orders of the people’. As rightly pointed out by Beal (2003: 92): ‘Here, Walker not only tells us how the word merchant should be pronounced, but gives us a window into the sociolinguistic salience of the alternative pronunciation and insight into the process of linguistic change that was in progress.’ The relationship between accent and class had already been made explicit by Sheridan, back in the 1760s: As the court pronunciation is no where methodically taught, and can be acquired only by conversing with people in polite life, it is as a sort of proof that a person has kept good company, and on that account is sought after by all, who wish to be considered as fashionable people, or members of the beau monde. (Sheridan 1762: 30) The standard language debate started by orthoepists and lexicographers in the pages of their dictionaries and treatises was later transferred on to the pages of newspapers, thus reaching a wider readership and involving more people in the ‘standard accent’ debate. Readers started to make personal contributions to the debate, shedding new light on the standard language

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Table 8.1  The entry for ‘merchant’ in Sheridan (1780) and Walker (1791) MERCHANT, maI´r-tshaInt. One who trafficks to remote countries.

MERCHANT, me2r´tsh a4nt. One who trafficks to remote countries.  Mr. Sheridan pronounces the e in the first syllable of this word, like the a in march; and it is certain that, about thirty years ago, this was the general pronunciation; but since that time the sound a has been gradually wearing away; and the sound of e is so fully established, that the former is now become gross and vulgar, and is only to be heard among the lower orders of the people.

ideology. As argued elsewhere (Sturiale 2014; 2016a; 2016b; 2018), if on the one hand the press allowed people to have their say, on the other hand it contributed significantly to reinforcing and promoting ‘false myths’ which, in the long run, were to characterise prescriptive attitudes more on a social than a purely linguistic level. To use Fitzmaurice’s words, newspapers and magazines ‘participated in the dissemination of the language of prescriptivism through complaints about language’ (1998: 324). As rightly claimed by Beal: The second half of the eighteenth century was, indeed, the period when the standardisation of English pronunciation reached the codification stage, as variants became prescribed or proscribed and clear guidelines for the attainment of ‘correct’ pronunciation appeared in the form of pronouncing dictionaries. (2010: 36) Thus, while eighteenth-­ century pronouncing dictionaries codified the standard forms of English pronunciation, newspapers were subsequently crucial to establishing their widespread acceptance. Together with articles, book or theatrical reviews and advertisements, important examples are to be found in ‘letters to the printer’: Sir, I have always had a particular aversion on any deviations from a rectitude in every respect. You will, perhaps, esteem me scrupulously nice, affectedly delicate, when I tell you that I cannot bear excess nor extravagance in behaviour, in dress or in food; nor yet misapplication in words, vicious pronunciation, or ungrammatical language in conversation. (Public Advertiser, 8 October 1784)

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case study 6 : the press and the standard accent 217 What is important to note here is that ‘vicious’, as used by Thomas Dyche in his Guide to the English Tongue (1707) and other early eighteenth-­century scholars, referred to ‘unclear’ articulation of sounds or ‘incorrect’ pronunciation of classical languages, that is, Latin and Greek. Towards the end of the century ‘vicious’ started to be associated with regional accents or substandard varieties, as shown in the following example, where the actor Thomas Abthorpe Cooper (1776–1849) received some criticism for his performance of Hamlet: The parts wherein he was least excellent were the soliloquies; he rather too much seemed to be addressing himself to an audience; and he sometimes had a vicious pronunciation, particularly of the words, die, (daye); by, (baye); friends, (fraiends); and memory, (mamory): but these slight errors, we trust, his good sense will soon enable him to correct. (Courier and Evening Gazette, 27 October 1795) Theatregoers and journalists were very attentive in spotting deviant, or better ‘vulgar’, forms of pronunciation in actors and actresses alike, as in the case of Mrs Adam Smith (1743?–1803): Whatever imperfections we discovered in Mrs. Smith, she amply recompensed by her first song in the act, which was sung divinely. Yet we must recommend her in the future to pay more attention to the dialogue, and not offend by vulgar pronunciation. (Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 2 October 1775) The Morning Herald commented of Sarah Kemble (1755–1831), also known as Mrs Siddons, when playing Portia at Drury Lane: ‘Her perseverance in the vulgar pronunciation of Merchant is an argument much against her; the very sound of letters should have taught her better’ (Morning Herald, 3 March 1782, italics in original). As has already been said, another important key term in the debate is ‘provincial’. That some features of regional accents started to be stigmatised in the eighteenth century has already been highlighted; what I wish to point out here is that the issue of provincialism led to the idea that ‘English is English’, that is, correct English is that used in England, especially southern England, as promoted by the orthoepist Kenrick: There seems indeed a most ridiculous absurdity in the pretensions of a native of Aberdeen or Tipperary, to teach the natives of London to speak and to read. Various have been nevertheless the modest attempts of the Scots and Irish, to establish a standard of English pronunciation. That they should not

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have succeeded is no wonder. Men cannot teach others what they do not themselves know . . . (1784: i–ii). Kenrick’s words soon found an echo in some newspaper articles: in an age like this, when attempts of a much more arduous nature are every day presented to our notice: when pigs are brought to exercise all the functions of rationality; and Hibernians profess to teach the true pronunciation of the English tongue. (Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser, 14 December 1786) Interestingly enough, ‘provincial’ readers of ‘provincial’ newspapers made their contribution to the debate over ‘provincial pronunciation’, as in the following letter to the editor of the Lancaster Gazette written by a certain, well-­ informed ‘Critologos’: Sir, Presuming the following hints will not be unacceptable to some readers within the circuit of your paper, your insertion of them will oblige. A North-­ country youth, who has received a tolerable education, at the schools in his own neighbourhood, and who is determined to seek his fortune in the world, generally sets his face towards the meridian sun. I approve of this direction, for he undoubtedly, by it, approaches the centre of opulence, politeness, and refinement. No sooner does he lose sight of his native district, than he begins to talk fine, or in other words, to attempt to speak with ­propriety . . . ­Every blunder which may lead to a detection of his country is attended with confusion and embarrassment, for nothing is more dreaded than this ­discovery – ­nothing will tinge his cheek with a deeper crimson than to be told from whence he comes by his dialect; he is even as solicitous to avoid every appearance of provincial idiom, as if it were criminal to be caught tripping. However, in the course of a few years, by diligent attention, he is able to speak his new language with a good degree of fluency, and, at least in his own opinion, with equal propriety and accent with his Southern associates. Notwithstanding this proficiency, he has still the mortification of being frequently detected by the nice observer from the South, from what cause he cannot conceive, and of having his ears assailed by this presumptuous interrogatory, ‘I believe you are from the North, Sir?’. Now, the object of these remarks is to warn him of a hidden rock, upon which he has often split unawares; I mean the pronunciation of the diphthong aw and au, and of the a in al or all; all of

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case study 6 : the press and the standard accent 219 which he uniformly pronounces as o: whereas the true sound of these letters is widely different, it being a compound of, or middle sound between, a in mamma, and o in open. I allow it is difficult to acquire, being a new sound to the North-­country man, and brings into action a part of enunciative organs which has not been played on before. He has never been apprized of it by his schoolmaster, who most probably was not conscious of it himself, nor has he been able to find it intelligibly defined in any English grammar, or other essay on orthoepy he may have read . . . (Lancaster Gazette, 2 December 1809) Other important newspaper sections, such as job advertisements, offer clear evidence of how proper and correct pronunciation represented an essential prerequisite: An USHER wanted for teaching Greek at a School, north of Durham. He must be an unmarried man, of a sober character, well skilled in Greek, and who speaks English in purity, free from any provincial accent or bad pronunciation. One bred at Eton School would be preferred, if otherwise properly qualified. (London Chronicle, 11 May 1780) And also: To Teachers. At Mr. Hodgson’s Academy. A person well qualified to instruct Youth, in the Latin and Greek Tongues; also to teach the Higher Classes, English and Geography. Also Wanted, to attend a Ladies Boarding School, and to assist at certain Hours in the Academy. A person capable of teaching the English Language grammatically; it is particularly required, that he shall read well, have no provincial Accent, write a good Hand, and understand common A ­ rithmetic . . . ­none else need apply. (Manchester Mercury, 21 May 1793, italics in original) Crowley’s comment on provincialism and vulgarism is also worth mentioning here. He writes: ‘The provincialism is regional, the vulgarism class-­bound, and it is always possible for a provincialism to become a vulgarism’ (Crowley 2003: 151). This is precisely what happened in the period under investigation. The accent of the best speakers in the capital, codified by orthoepists and promulgated by elocutionists, became not just a goal to pursue, but also a mark of class distinction. To conclude, the sociolinguistic data extracted have shown that newspapers, and their readers, made a concerted effort to indicate, and safeguard, a model accent as the linguistic ideal to be attained. Moreover, the press mirrored the essence of the language instability, of sociolinguistic change and of the eighteenth-­century normative attitudes.

Chapter Nine

NEWS, DEBATE AND THE PUBLIC SPHERE Pat Rogers

Introduction In an age before modern media evolved, how did the British press contribute to the circulation of information in the wider public arena? It is not easy to offer a definitive answer, in spite of the advances in scholarly understanding that have occurred in recent decades. Studies of particular value include work on London newspapers (Harris 1987), on provincial papers (Cranfield 1962; Wiles 1965), on the general history of the press (Sutherland 1986; Black 2001), on the Irish press world (Munter 1967; 1988), on the Edinburgh press (Couper 1908) and on the cultural role of print (Sommerville 1996). Important as these sources are, they tend to pay less attention to periodicals outside the daily or weekly organs. All round, the most informative approaches from the point of view of this discussion are Barker (2014) and Pettegree (2014): the former is very strong on the development of the press in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, while the latter has the special merit of setting the British experience in a broad European context. An exhaustive survey of this phase would require looking at the Restoration, the early eighteenth century (including periodical writing, notably that of authors such as Defoe and Swift), and would go on to consider the experience of the literary community in the age of Junius and John Wilkes. Space precludes such an enquiry: the limits imposed on the coverage of this chapter are explained in the following section. We should keep in mind some relevant aspects of the social and cultural context, for example the development of coffee house culture, the slow but steady increase in literacy over time, and the spread of communications through improvements to roads and the postal system. A 220

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significant issue in the background is that of the threat of censorship or legal sanctions. This is an area that has been greatly illuminated by scholars such as Laurence Hanson (1936), J. A. Downie (1979) and Thomas Keymer (2019). A case study at the end of this chapter provides an outline of the career of the Jacobite printer and editor Nathaniel Mist, treating him not as a wholly representative case but as a symbolic instance of some perils that journalists faced throughout the period. Certain facets of the subject are neglected here, since they are dealt with elsewhere in this volume: see, in particular, Chapters 4 and 19. In a concluding section, some matters raised by the much discussed ideas of Jürgen Habermas are treated in a cursory fashion, necessarily so if the chapter is not to tip over from historical particularities into the province of a more general discourse of cultural and sociological theory.

Locating the Press This chapter will focus on newspapers and periodicals published in London, with scant attention to the English provincial, Scottish and Irish press. The heaviest concentration lies on the period affected by the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695 and the implications of new legislation such as the Copyright Act (1709) and the Stamp Act (1712). The grounds for the geographical limitation are self-­evident. London was by far the biggest player in the world of print, rivalled only by a handful of cities in Europe such as Amsterdam and Paris. By comparison, the fledgling Irish trade had scarcely taken wing in the early 1700s: there was only one weekly paper in Dublin, as against twenty-­ six in London, several of which were duly imported from across the sea. Not until the second half of the century did the periodical press establish itself in the provinces. Among the more prominent organs was the Dublin Journal, run by George Faulkner, famous among much else for his connection with the works of Swift. He was particularly successful in catching a large share of the advertising m ­ arket – ­an asset not just in procuring revenue but also in attracting readers who might not be much concerned about the news columns. Initially the newspapers had been chary of dealing with controversial issues. However, the famous Sacheverell trial of 1710 gave the Irish reading public ‘a taste of political excitement after which they no doubt grew hungry for more than the Lenten political fare normally offered in the Irish press’ (Munter 1967: 15, 17, 60, 124). The outcry over Wood’s halfpence in 1724 occasioned not just Swift’s Drapier’s Letters but a

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wide array of hostile comments answered by government apologists in the prints. Meanwhile from 1699 there was the semi-­official Edinburgh Gazette, mounted by the energetic printer and bookseller James Watson (c. 1664–1722); it did not last long, but it was soon followed by the Edinburgh Courant in 1705. An occasional flashpoint, such as the Porteous riots in the Scottish capital (1736), served to provide ‘headlines’ (not that these really existed then), but major outlets such as the Caledonian Mercury continued to toe the government line on most issues. Still, most of the big news came from outside: after the Union in 1707 Scotland lost its own Parliament, while that of Ireland held severely limited powers. Local politics remained important for both countries, but no one in either of them could have any doubt that politics, diplomacy and the economy were run from London. Equally, the provincial papers in England were heavily dependent on their colleagues in the capital to supply news, both domestic and foreign. Their circulation was almost entirely regional, until papers such as the Newcastle Journal and the York Courant started to expand their reach in the middle third of the century (Cranfield 1962: 28–31, 202). The London trade tried with some success to take advantage of this vacuum: ‘The proprietors of several London papers made special efforts to get their papers into the hands of readers outside London’ (Wiles 1965: 5–10). To that extent the public sphere extended beyond the capital, as information spread across the country, but it remained harder for dispersed groups to participate face-­ to-­ face with like-­ minded members of the community than for those in the capital. The content of ‘news’ as envisaged by editors placed great emphasis on overseas events. Usually, the doings of the Pope, the Habsburg emperor and the Grand Mufti arrogated more space than the trivial activities of commonplace individuals whose only claim to attention was that they happened to live in Britain. The mass of the people only made it into newspaper columns if they were the victims of a freak accident such as a fire or a flood, unless they ended up in the ranks of malefactors sentenced at the Old Bailey. This concentration on foreign affairs derived from the old intelligence system employed by the diplomatic service. The government possessed the only regular means of gaining access to information, other than that supplied by sea captains returning home after long voyages, who would retail titbits from their remote ports of call (often months if not years in arrears). Well into the period covered in this volume, it was the office of the Secretary of State in Whitehall that generated reports, rather than the printers’ shops where the papers were put together.

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Moreover, throughout this period, governments gave support in two ways to newspapers that favoured their views. They subsidised authors, so that William Arnall became ‘by far the most highly paid of the London journalists’ during Walpole’s reign (Harris 1987: 108–9; Hanson [1936] 1967: 112–13); according to his critics, this yielded enough for Arnall to set himself up with a fancy coach. They also used the Post Office to distribute copies of such journals around the country (Hanson [1936] 1967: 109–19). In 1748 the opposition paper Old England attacked Fielding’s pro-­ministerial Jacobite’s Journal with the claim that ‘no less than 2000 of this Court-Informer’s weekly Labours are dispersed, by special Order of his Patron’ (most likely the prime minister, Henry Pelham). As for the temporal span explored here, this is crucial for reasons that will be described in the next section of this chapter. That London was the metropolis of the entire kingdom at this juncture is underlined by the fact that, in the opening years of the new century, it supplied the first representative case in Britain of several categories of journalism: namely, regular dailies and weeklies, evening papers, provincial papers and Sunday papers. The popular tri-­weekly form, pioneered by the Flying Post, Post Boy and Post Man in 1695, gained increasing traction. Significantly, these all had a clear political flavour from early on. They dealt with some highly divisive issues, and that was the very thing that gave them an appeal to certain sectors of the population. Another factor frequently neglected is the widespread use of historical extracts, where the lead article would consist of lengthy quotations from classic authors such as Clarendon (the first page of newspapers was commonly taken up by an essay, not ‘news’ in our sense, which was relegated to an inside page). It is true that sometimes these passages were chosen for tendentious purposes, inviting the reader to see a parallel with contemporary events. But nobody seems to have objected to the practice: topicality was not an essential ingredient of newspaper coverage.

Producers and Consumers As soon as we attempt to determine the way in which ideas percolated into the community at large, we encounter a difficulty that gives rise to some conundrums regarding method. The point was clearly expressed by Robert Munter: It is ­impossible . . . ­accurately to evaluate the influence of the newspaper press, for one can never determine in what measure

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the newspaper moulded public opinion or was reflection of that opinion, or to what extent newspaper battles raged before an apathetic and unconcerned reading public. (Munter 1967: x) Obviously, the degree of audience involvement would vary at different times and in different places. During the English Civil War, conflict on the ground reached a pitch never subsequently matched on the British mainland. However, the news industry was in its infancy, with only a few newsbooks enjoying more than a spasmodic life, while journalists with a wide base of influence such as Marchamont Nedham (whichever side he took at any particular point) were quite thin on the ground. Circulation figures shot up for a time, but the moment passed, and as the Stationers’ Company strengthened its grip on the book trade, so the flood of topical pamphlets diminished for the next half century. Even the Exclusion Crisis in 1679–81, which embroiled two factions in a fierce struggle over the choice of a successor to Charles II, failed to change the course of journalism. A handful of remarkable literary works emerged along with a large body of unremarkable polemics, but the episode came to an end without any apparent need for a substantial newspaper press. Short-­lived newspapers failed to combat government censorship, in effect leaving the field to the official and nakedly partisan London Gazette. The concentration here lies on the years between the Revolution in 1688 and the rising in 1745–46 of the Young Pretender, Charles Edward Stuart. This is because it marks the moment when the British newspaper really took off, and because it embraces a period of especially marked social and political divisions. First tagged by historians a generation ago as an age marked by ‘The Divided Society’, this span of years witnessed a succession of highly contested events and ideas (Holmes and Speck 1967). After the tolerated invasion by William of Orange and the deposition of James II, a nervous decade led up to the war-­torn age of Queen Anne, overshadowed by a succession crisis that was only partially brought to an end by the arrival of George I in 1714. There followed a series of Jacobite attempts to divert the course of history, most prominently the failed adventure of James Edward Stuart, the Old Pretender, in 1715–16. Then in 1720 came the South Sea Bubble, when the nation wobbled and briefly lost some of its faith in the large projects that the ruling powers had s­ upported – t­hat is, the recently established Hanoverian line, the unquestioned hegemony of Protestantism, the solid Whig dominance of government, the credit system that had been spawned by the Financial Revolution of the 1690s, the growth of large corporations underpinned by the

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stock market, and the burgeoning influence of the City of London. A collateral effect of the Bubble was the rise of Robert Walpole, who retained his hold on government until almost the eve of the 1745 rebellion, despite a constant barrage of opposition from his critics in the press. The episodes that took place in this era echoed to the words of the ablest practitioners of polemical journalism, either in newspapers, periodicals or (then a close adjunct) pamphleteering on topical issues. As Andrew Pettegree has observed, ‘The competitive and vibrant London market was unusually precocious in plunging so boldly into the contentious politics of the early eighteenth century’ (2014: 367). It could be argued that this was simply a response to a climate of unprecedented discord in public and sometimes private life, where even fashions in opera or women’s dress might be split along party lines. But this does not meet the force of Munter’s quizzical comment above. If journalists were merely preaching to the choir, then would not their words operate in a kind of feedback system, reinforcing the prejudices of those who read their copy, and so contributing to further manifestations of what Swift called ‘this damned business of party’ (Goldgar 1961: vii)? These outbreaks might themselves be reported in the press, to set up a regressive loop of information. It is more difficult to interpret this surge in partisan squabbles because of a single circumstance: in previous periods of British history the population had not been able to read almost daily accounts of what went on in elections. The new element lay in the fact that potential arbiters of political success (always assuming they were among the minority of prosperous males who enjoyed the vote in most constituencies) now had the opportunity to weigh up the merits of opposing sides through the medium of the press. Thus, before they went to the polls in 1705, they could take their pick between the competing views conveyed by diatribes in John Tutchin’s Observator (flaming Whig) or Charles Leslie’s Rehearsal (intemperate Tory). It seems unlikely that these verbal fisticuffs would have no effect at all on the electorate, leaving them ‘apathetic and unconcerned’. However, no firm connection between press coverage and results can be made, even though the far from secret ballot might be available in printed poll books. Floating voters certainly existed, but they did not veer sufficiently in one direction to decide the outcome, which ended up more or less a stalemate. This was despite the fact that the Whig government had launched a robust campaign in the press and elsewhere, matched by vigorous retorts by their opponents (Speck 1970: 98–114). All that we can say is that an ever larger amount of material was produced and consumed in this era, and something

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nearer to the modern concept of public opinion began to be expressed in the public prints. The work of writers such as Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Swift and Henry Fielding benefited from the ending of licensing restrictions in 1695, which was the signal for a major period of growth among booksellers, publishers, printers and allied occupations. Each of these men had a natural constituency, in particular the Tory squires whom Swift addressed in the Examiner and the Hanoverian loyalists to whom Fielding appealed in the Jacobite’s Journal. Defoe faced a harder task to create a loyal following for his Review, but he did more canvassing and lobbying through a team of agents scattered around the country that he assembled on his travels on behalf of his patrons Sidney Godolphin and Robert Harley. In the face of this new core of attacks in print, the authorities did not give up on efforts to maintain censorship, but any measures they introduced to control the ever expanding flow of hostile material, such as the imposition of a stamp duty on newspapers in 1712, proved only partly successful. Swift predicted in the immediate aftermath of the measure that Grub Street was dead, but that was very far from the case. In reality, the heyday of confrontational journalism was only just beginning, as steadily more papers flooded out from the printing office to the streets. Baulked in this direction, the government found it necessary to rely on more traditional measures of bringing offenders to heel, notably by prosecutions for sedition (see Keymer 2019). Editors would continue to live on a perilous edge for years to come, a fact demonstrated by the career of Nathaniel Mist described in the following case study. One thing we need to consider is the way that the newspaper and periodical business developed. We have quite a lot of concrete evidence on the recruitment and activity of the individuals who managed the operations of the press, whereas what we know about their readers is more fugitive, anecdotal and problematic (see Chapter 4). Among the innovations that occurred in this period was the entrance of a new kind of proprietor. At first the main dailies were run by eminently respectable book trade figures such as Samuel Buckley, ultimately Gazetteer for life, who had come to prominence as printer of the staid and often deadly dull Daily Courant. He was a publisher of the Spectator (1711–13), the most influential periodical of the day, and he acquired half the lucrative rights in reprint editions. However, the dominance of Buckley and his ilk began to be challenged by new men who burst on to the scene in the second decade of the history. Their significance has been summarised by the leading authority on this topic, Michael Harris:

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news, debate and the public sphere 227 Lacking the corporate resources of the respectable trade, the outsiders were heavily dependent on those forms of output which required the lowest level of initial investment. Consequently, newspapers represented a crucial support and many of the names in this sector, Mist, Applebee, Read and Parker among others, were proclaimed by the 1720s on the most read of cut-­price weeklies and tri-­weeklies. (Harris 1989: 49)

What does this invasion of the space of the old guard tell us about the public sphere? Clearly, it indicates an opening up to talent, forging a route to success for groups previously held back by governmental and professional restrictions. The ‘outsiders’ did not have the connections with the political and literary elite, among them individuals such as Addison and Steele, that the trade insiders had enjoyed. However, they took advantage of emerging conditions to strengthen their position. As the weeklies, all published on Saturday, gained ground, so older organs such as the dailies and tri-­weeklies lost circulation. Then, when taxes began to bite, halfpenny and penny papers started to proliferate, suggesting that a wider audience existed if costs and the cover price could be kept down. To say that commercial matters affected the recruitment and career prospects of newspaper editors implies that they were seeking to meet a perceived demand among potential readers. In other words, a different class of influencer had come to the top, probably appealing in some cases to a slightly different public. Nathaniel Mist and James Read were certainly motivated by their political convictions, one a rabid Jacobite and the other a doughty Hanoverian. But they were part of a commercial shift in the press, as were John ­Applebee – ­best known otherwise for printing speeches by those about to be hanged at T ­ yburn – ­and George Parker, a skilful manipulator of format to dodge increases in the stamp duty. All had some dealings with the individuals who worked at the cheap end of the market, exemplified by the unscrupulous printer-­entrepreneur William Rayner (Harris 1987: 20–3, 89–93). On their list of contacts they had not the well-­heeled literati among the Kit Cat Club, but a hard scuffling professional author who sold his pen to a diverse group of papers. His name was Daniel Defoe. Almost imperceptibly, these developments enlarged the sphere of influence exerted by the press, as it came to be defined by access to readily available information on current events and social trends.

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The Review Defoe’s extensive journalistic activity, which is also considered in Chapter 8, embraced various branches of the profession, some of them briefly listed below. For example, he worked for Mist’s paper as a plant by the government, to tone down some of the extreme positions taken up by its editor, as well as to earn the useful sum of two pounds per week (or so a printer helpfully informed the authorities in 1718). It is likely that he contributed regularly to Applebee’s Weekly Journal for several years, although the attribution of individual items in its columns presents difficulties. In Edinburgh he had worked with all the leading printers, who also ran newspapers, and attempted to gain control of one of his own. Later on in London he certainly had some interest, editorially and financially, in the Whitehall Evening Post, and very likely in the Daily Post. He also brought out a series of weeklies around the time of the great Bubble under the titles the Manufacturer, the Commentator and the Director. These were not light belletristic essays in the manner of those attempting to imitate the Tatler and the Spectator. On the contrary, they featured short, punchy articles (one per issue) confronting some of the biggest economic and political issues of the day, as they touched not just on the iniquities of the South Sea Company, but also on the plight of the silk weavers in Spitalfields and the threat of an outbreak of bubonic p ­ lague – D ­ efoe had seen enough of that scourge as a boy. For this chapter, the most broadly relevant aspect of his work comes in his paper the Review. Like the journals just mentioned, it brings up an important issue of categorisation, one that has not generally been properly faced by historians of the press. It was raised by Andrew Pettegree, when he observed that ‘The eighteenth century witnessed a spectacular rise in the periodical press. As the century wore on, newspapers would comprise only a small portion of this’ (2014: 269). Pettegree also identified many authors active in the industry, producing ‘what were essentially advocacy pamphlets in serial f­orm – ­men like Marchamont Nedham or Daniel Defoe’. He went on, ‘Most of the great journalists of the eighteenth century were either pamphleteers (Defoe and Swift) or wits (Addison and Steele). So although this was the age when the word “journalist” was first coined, it did not yet describe an independent craft’ (2014: 308). In reality, it is hard to make firm distinctions between authors, pamphleteers, essayists, journalists and editors until the end of the period: only in the last quarter of the century do we begin to see writers known for the copy they produced for newspapers and for nothing e­ lse – a­ good example would

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be Henry Bate, editor of the widely read Morning Post from 1775. One of the factors here is that most of the content of periodicals had remained anonymous, with the individual responsible masquerading with a greater or lesser degree of transparency as ‘Cato’, the Idler or the Hypochondriack (to take examples from across the century in various newspapers). Defoe was the great exception. Unlike the other famous names mentioned by Pettegree, he ran the full gamut of journalistic roles. (Steele’s connection with day-­to-­day reportage was limited to his job as Gazetteer (1707–10), a political appointment that was abruptly terminated as soon as the Tories regained power.) By contrast, Defoe explored every avenue of the profession, taking his turn in the service of daily, evening, tri-­weekly and weekly papers, at the same time as he was issuing pamphlets and longer tracts. Pettegree is again on the mark when he says that ‘The concept of a journalist as an informed observer with specialist expertise had yet to be invented. No papers carried reports from named journalists writing under their own byline’ (2014: 312). Yet Defoe somehow became a reporter avant la lettre. More mobile than most in his situation, he went out into the country to witness elections, trials and street ­riots – ­ostensibly he started doing this in the service of patrons such as Robert Harley who wanted the latest information for political reasons, so that he could broadcast the desired message to the multitude. In the event, however, Defoe used his spying missions as a springboard for his own highly opinionated take on what was happening across the nation. The Review (1704–13) stands apart from all else as the work of a gifted reporter. Defoe bolsters his arguments on every conceivable subject with first-­hand observations, anecdotes, local customs, folklore and gossipy tales. But he goes further: at times he takes on the role of an investigative journalist, setting out the plight of mistreated workers in ‘an Account of the Arbitrary and Tyrannical Usage of the Masters and Keelmen, by the Coal-­Owners at Newcastle’ (27 June 1710 and following issues). On other occasions he becomes a spokesman for a particular group, for example the Royal African Company (30 December 1712 and following issues), where his fierce defence of its monopoly rights against private traders may or may not have been influenced by his ownership of two shares in the corporation. Perhaps his boldest campaign was the one he waged on behalf of ‘the poor Palatine Refugees’ (16 July 1709), whom he wished to see rehoused in a special rural settlement. For some weeks he took up the cause of this unfortunate group of Protestants fleeing their homeland on the Rhine. Two waves of more than 10,000 people who arrived that summer

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were forced to live in squalid tent-­cities on the edge of London. The government had no experience of mass immigration on this scale and cast about for answers. Defoe’s proposal in the Review seems to have been ignored. He knew that the incomers would be unpopular with the native population, as immigrants commonly are, but he stuck to his guns. In this and other matters he used his paper to lead rather than follow public opinion. In places the Review gives us a clear autobiographical account of something its author experienced. There is a case in point when he describes what occurred in Devon on a mission for Harley. The story concerns the actions of a High Church magistrate, who attempted to have this dangerous infiltrator arrested (25 August 1705) – shades of the government snoop in Somerset, almost a century later, who wanted to take up Wordsworth and Coleridge as French undercover agents. Defoe warns travellers to ‘have a Care of Justice S—, near Crediton’, making light of a genuinely alarming experience that might have ended up with one more spell in custody. The humour evident here is an aspect of a thoroughly humane relationship with his audience. The persona in Swift’s Examiner or Fielding’s Champion is just ­that – ­a mask assumed to get over a certain political point, deriving authority from the writer’s privileged stance. The accents of the Review are those of a living, breathing individual: full of prejudice, capable of rant, seldom a slave to politeness, but also endearing at times, and ready to engage us in active debate. This is not the way that controversial writers had generally behaved in the previous century. Another feature of the paper is the opportunity it provided for feedback in the concluding section in each number. In the first year of the run this was labelled ‘Advice from the Scandalous Club’, and invited readers to attend a virtual get-­together. The host introduces letters and queries from imaginary correspondents, creating a kind of public space in print. Later on this slot was taken up at intervals by ‘Miscellanea’, comprising a more informal and improvisatory version of the main essay series. After these came advertisements, and since a lot of these relate to Defoe’s own publications there is a consanguinity that does not appear in most journals. No writer of the age was attacked so often or so bitterly, and one of the functions of the Review was to reply to critics. Inevitably Defoe was caught up in many rancorous disputes, while constantly deploring the situation in which he found himself: ‘Our Party-­ Feuds, our Personal-­ Prejudices, our particular Resentments, take up all our Time’ (Review, 28 October 1712), an idea to which he reverts obsessively. In addition he was among the first to identify fake

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news as a major flaw in the existing world of print, and this too became a recurrent theme. Once he wrote a paper opposing the imposition of a stamp tax on papers, even though it came from the government of Robert Harley, to whom he remained loyal. He concedes that there are many scurrilous publications that deserve to be curtailed, producing ‘a Flux of Scandal and Quarrelling of Parties’ – and generously recognises that his own journal might be in question: If it had been to suppress Reviews, Observators, Examiners, Medleys, Scolding Pamphlets, and the like, nay, if all Papers had been forbid to speak of, or relate the Publick Affairs, I should have been the first to join in with the Thought, and prove that I write not to preserve or promote Strife, but Peace, among us. (Review, 29 April 1712) But taxes are not the way to address the problem, and this solution would serve only to put many operatives out of work. There follows a highly suggestive estimate of the nature of production among the printing houses, and the knock-­on effect in the newspaper industry of any new taxes: We have now about 25 Presses Employ’d in the several Parts of Britain, besides London and Edinburgh, which are all wholly Employ’d in Printing small Tracts, little odd Pieces, and get their Livings very well by it, and are very useful to the Countries in several Respects, as to Trade, as at Exeter, Bristol, Norwich, Canterbury, Chester, Nottingham, Stamford, York, Newcastle, Glasgow, Aberdeen, and many others, not reckoning our Universities, perhaps not one of these ever wrought a Bound Book, but Prayer Books, Psalm-­Books, Catechisms, Sermons, Story-­Books, Song-­ Books, and a Thousand such Trifles; not one of these can bear the Tax now propos’d, nor can one of these Printing Houses stand, besides several in London. Immediately all of the poor People are Divested of the Means they had to live: I have little to say of the poor Wretches that cry these Things, and carry them all over England. (Review, 29 April 1712) Making due allowance for some special pleading on behalf of Defoe’s favourite trading classes, this is all very much to the purpose. It shows the intersectionality of the industry, not least as this concerned newspapers and periodicals. Most early newspapers were edited by printers, very often sole proprietors, who had a jobbing business to run as well.

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We might note three other features of this description. First, the preponderance of religious works among the printers’ output, a fact that tends to get obscured when we assess the apparently secular province of journalism. Second, the towns Defoe mentions: almost all were among the very first regional centres to set up and support a local newspaper. Third, a reminder at the end that the distribution methods for print still involved humble carters and pedlars. It is not until 1714 that we hear of specialised newsmen, whose job was ‘delivering the local newspaper and the various wares sold by an eighteenth century country printer’ (Cranfield 1962: 191). In time agencies were set up in smaller towns and villages as the catchment area grew in line with better roads. One thing that did not change was the need to disperse news from London to the provinces through the postal services, and here too improvements in speed and efficiency fostered a growth in the outlets available to consumers in more remote regions. In this matter, improvements were a little slower to reach the network radiating from Dublin and Edinburgh, but they too saw more regular deliveries in the later part of the century. Defoe did not live long enough to see the full effects of the rationalisation of postal routes, mainly associated with the work of Ralph Allen from about 1720, involving the extension of cross-­posts that linked towns on the different highways. However, his comments elsewhere on the penny post in the London area show that he recognised the way in which a better mail system served to enable communications generally. He would certainly have welcomed the coming of the first custom-­built Royal Mail coaches in 1784, running between two of the cities he knew best, London and Bristol. News travelled fast now, and proprietors were prompt to see the opportunities this opened up.

Conclusion For this period, the question r­emains – a­ s it does for the modern ­world – ­whether sheer growth in media outlets is the same thing as the existence of a healthy political or intellectual culture. Defoe mentioned the Examiner and the Medley, active in 1710–11, and perhaps the most celebrated combatants in the print wars of the century. These papers were conducted on either side by notable figures, the renowned Jonathan Swift and the almost forgotten Arthur Maynwaring, secretary of the Duke and Duchess of Marlborough who became the chef de la propagande for the Whig party. We might have expected this to be a one-­sided contest, but in fact Maynwaring gave almost as good as he got. He died shortly after the battle concluded, leaving up in the air

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the outcome of their main disputes over the negotiations to bring the War of the Spanish Succession to an end. The Whigs then turned to Richard Steele in an effort to repel the attacks of the Examiner, now in the hands of Delarivier Manley. They also had to deal with some coruscating pamphlets from the hand of Swift such as The Conduct of the Allies, until he was shunted out of his influential niche in London to the relatively innocuous pastures of Dublin. It is not clear how many people were ever converted by the savage thrusts dealt on both sides. Their chief role was possibly that of keeping up the spirit of their adherents. It is safe to assume that some neutrals read both papers, just as the tri-­weeklies, the Tory Post Boy and the Whig Post Man, continued to wage an inconclusive proxy war. But for the committed, there was only one voice that needed to be heard. As late as 1728 a pro-­Whig paper harked back to the famous struggle: ‘The author of the Medley was a writer of the utmost politeness, and was for that reason little read, while the Examiner who knew no decency or distinction was the darling of the rabble’ (Black 2001: 26). This is an absurdly partisan view of the exchanges between Swift and Maynwaring, but the fact that this judgement could be made indicates that the sharp divisions of opinion in Queen Anne’s day had never been resolved. Had this really ever been an instructive debate, helping to educate the public on the issues? Some may think that it was the equivalent of c­ lickbaiting – a­ way of attracting attention in order to abuse opponents and obfuscate the issues. Few archives survive to record what kind of discussions went on in ­public – ­let alone ­private – s­ paces. Debating societies did not flourish much before the middle of the century, when they helped to set the stage for Wilkes’s challenges to the law. This lacuna is not surprising in an age when parliamentary reporting was illegal. Social groups of many sorts existed, but such informal dining clubs as the Brothers, in which Tory writers participated, left few t­ races – ­Swift was put off when ‘rabble’ such as the Duke of Ormonde were allowed to join (Allen 1933: 77). Even the bodies with the most distinguished membership were too snooty (the Kit Cat), too self-­protective (the Society of Dilettanti) or too specialised (the Society of Antiquaries) to put their proceedings in print. The transactions of the Royal Society produced important scientific work, but they do not chronicle the backstairs politics that might have made it into the columns of a scandal s­ heet – ­a medium that did not fully emerge until the appearance of vehicles such as Bate’s Morning Post in the 1770s, to blazon the tales of notorious figures such as Martha Ray and the Duchess of Kingston (see Brewer 2004: 37–62; Andrew and McGowen 2001: 58–67; Gervat

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2003: 136–54). By comparison, the London papers had a hard time in 1723 digging up as much dirt as they wanted on the call girl Sally Salisbury, a Christine Keeler of the day, when they managed just a few pathetic attempts to link her, for example, with a South Sea merchant (British Journal, 11 May). In truth, journalists had not yet learned the dark arts of the modern muckraker. Admittedly Defoe liked to inveigh against ‘oblique pointing at Persons in Matters Scandalous’ (Review, 29 March 1711), but his critics said this was the pot calling the kettle black. If there was a public sphere, then, the press was not particularly successful in reporting its doings. This concept, of course, was popularised by Jürgen Habermas in his book from 1962, belatedly translated into English in the 1980s. His argument has provoked widespread criticism, not all relevant to the subject of the present chapter. The most pertinent section is the one entitled ‘The Model Case of British Development’, which aptly cites some of the key developments we have touched on. Habermas argues that Robert Harley was the first statesman to take advantage of the new situation in the world of print, engaging ‘authors like Defoe’ (actually there were remarkably few others), and adds that journals such as the Review and the Examiner ‘were discussed in clubs and coffee houses, at home and in the streets’ (Habermas [1962] 1989: 57–62). The basic point holds, even though as noted we do not have reliable accounts of what was discussed in clubs and can only guess the nature of domestic conversations. Not all debate went on in the columns of newspapers, or took its inspiration from the things that journalists wrote. Habermas is certainly right that coffee houses played some role in the creation of a more informed body of citizens. This process was aided by some of the factors already mentioned that allowed wider participation, though it stopped short of breaking down ‘the distinct masculine sociability’ such venues promoted (Ellis 2004: 110). William Dockwra, founder of the penny post, listed seven such establishments where mail was received (Sommerville 1996: 83). But you could not always rely on finding intense debate in progress around hot issues. Paul Langford cited evidence that ‘coffee houses, in their nature dedicated to sociability, were strangely noiseless’. One French visitor noted that on entrance you will probably find a pair of the natives ‘seated silently in a corner’. If one of them should throw off the national reserve sufficiently to make a comment, the other would put on a grave look ‘and return at most a dry monosyllabic answer, for two talkative Englishman seldom meet under the same roof ’ (Langford 2000: 179). With such obstacles to overcome, not even the rise of the

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newspaper could have turned the British into a naturally communicative race.

Case Study 7: Nathaniel Mist Pat Rogers Mist is not a household name in the history of print culture. However, he occupies a significant place in the development of the English newspaper during a period of major growth in the industry. His bold methods repeatedly brought him to the attention of the authorities as he tested the limits of the law at a time when the older forms of regulation came into question. New challenges arose to the existing system, which had involved a licensing regime whose basis went back to the decrees of the notorious Star Chamber (see Hanson [1936] 1967: 16–19). The areas under scrutiny included the arbitrary powers vested in the Stationers’ Company, a body increasingly unrepresentative of those joining the print trades; conflicting legal judgments on cases of sedition and blasphemy, some of which were hived off to the spiritual courts; and haziness over the implications of the new Copyright Act. There was a reluctance in some quarters (though not yet a total refusal) to employ antiquated remedies such as the pillory, branding or cropping the ears of offenders. Fines and gaol became more normal sanctions, along with securities for good behaviour. None of these deterrents actually deterred Mist for very long. It was his distinction to incur charges on several grounds, so that he was at risk of most punishments to which members of the trade were subject. In this respect he bears marked similarities with the bookseller Edmund Curll, another outsider who arrived from nowhere and went on to threaten the establishment, even to the extent of gaining a victory in the House of Lords over Alexander Pope and his team of supporters among the peers. According to newspaper stories, Mist actually challenged Curll to a duel (see Read’s Weekly Journal, 14 June 1718), but this might have been just a publicity stunt, a mode in which both men excelled. Mist’s origins are obscure. He may have been from Wiltshire, or else, as he claimed, the progeny of ‘honest soaky [toping?] Fellows’ from Lincolnshire. It is likely that he had little formal education and that he served as a common seaman as a young man (Chapman 2004). He emerges into our vision in 1716 as a printer inhabiting the long-­ established book trade area near St Paul’s Cathedral. It was then that he took over the Weekly Journal, or Saturday’s Post. He remained in control of this organ under various titles until shortly before his death in 1737, though later on he had to work in absentia. Somehow he learned to write a clear and vigorous prose, and to manage a business successfully despite the fact that he and his employees underwent

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constant harassment from the government. He became noteworthy chiefly as the most unquenchable Jacobite voice in the press for well over a decade. Other editors and journalists displaying sympathy for the Stuart cause, such as George Flint of the Shift Shifted, got into trouble over their activities, as did the virulent pamphleteer Charles Hornby, who inveighed against George I in 1723 as ‘a Prince led by Germans’ – but after due correction by the authorities none returned punches so hard or so often. Nothing silenced Mist, even when in order to escape imprisonment he was forced to abscond to Rouen, Calais and Boulogne (the last a familiar resort of bankrupt traders, homosexuals who had been outed and political exiles). He stands out from other members of the profession because he was so heavily involved in the big political issues of the day, around the South Sea time especially; because his career entwined for some years with that of Defoe, employed by the government to act as Mist’s minder in a bid to lessen the Jacobite rhetoric (‘a signal failure’, says Hanson [1936] 1967: 105); because he was, like Curll, colourful and newsworthy in himself; and above all because he became a lightning rod for legal issues surrounding the press, as he was arrested so many times. According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, he got into trouble with the authorities ‘on at least fourteen occasions’ (Chapman 2004). As early as 1717 and 1718 he was taken up several times for suspected libels, anti-­ministerial polemics or other seditious materials, some of which had not reached print but were uncovered during searches of his premises. Members of his staff such as James Wolfe, Edward Bingley and the oddly named Doctor Gaylard also had many trips down to Whitehall for an interrogation in the office of the Secretary of State. This set the pattern for the years to come. In 1720, as a result of attacks on Protestants in the German Palatinate supported by the king, Mist was dispatched to the King’s Bench prison and subsequently received a sentence of three months in prison, a fine of £50 (equal to an incalculable number of thousands today), securities for seven years’ good behaviour, and a spell in the pillory at Charing Cross and the Royal E ­ xchange – a ­ fate endured by Defoe and soon afterwards by Curll. Not surprisingly, the Journal went on in the same way, resulting in similar arrests, and just as predictably the securities were forfeited, having landed the printer’s wife in 1724 with a recognisance of no less than £1,400. So the saga went on. Warrants, raids, arrests, courts, bail, examinations. A collection of entries in the state papers featuring Mist could be worked up into a short screenplay. That medium was not then available, but by the time Pope gave him a cameo role in The Dunciad (1728) there was further copy ready to use. More arrests, and then a presentment by the Grand Jury of Middlesex on the usual grounds, occasioned by a satiric squib that targeted the new king, George II. It was deemed ‘a false, infamous, scandalous, seditious and treasonable libel’ – the powers that then were did not show much

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Figure 9.1  Daniel Defoe in the pillory (1703); it was said that onlookers threw flowers towards him in support (Courtesy of Wellcome Collection, Public Domain Mark) originality in drafting charges. They possibly thought that the still vague concept of libel (rarely used in cases of personal slander) could be made to stick more easily if it was defined by the standard epithets. The reach of the law extended even to Anne Dodd, Elizabeth Nutt and Elizabeth Smith, major players in the London wholesale trade and the women who distributed the Journal, along with many other papers. Nutt sent a pathetic message from Newgate gaol, asking the Duke of Newcastle to order her release: she was seventy years old, and claimed that she had sold the offending issue without having any idea of its contents. This may well have been true, but you did not have to be very close to the editorial process to run the hazard of retribution from on high. Mist had now decamped to France where he linked up with the eccentric Jacobite, Philip, Duke of Wharton. He also was given instructions by the court of the Pretender, based in Rome, to plant damaging stories in the British press. Even in his absence the newspaper remained a thorn in the flesh of Walpole’s government: they had tried ­everything – ­seizing the presses, issuing injunctions, blocking the distribution system through blocking the post.

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But it was an intractable problem. In the fullest account of Mist’s career as a newspaperman, Black reports that his sales were strong: in the case of the most flagitious number (the one that caused all the trouble in 1728) 10,750 copies were printed, more than influential journals such as the Spectator often attained (Black 2001: 29–37; see also Chapman 2004; Harris 1987: 105–6; Keymer 2019: 165–6; Sutherland 1986: 38–9). The story of Mist could be seen as one of heroic failure, in that the cause for which he underwent banishment was always going to be lost. Still, his pertinacity exposed to view many crucial aspects of the laws on sedition, showing that its implementation in the area of print culture needed to be made more precise and equitable if the right people were to be caught in its traps and suitable punishments imposed.

Chapter Ten

IRISH PERIODICAL NEWS Toby Barnard

I

n comparison with britain and other western European countries, newspapers and journals were slow to be published in Ireland. Their late arrival is most plausibly explained by the relatively small and scattered population, generally meagre incomes and low levels of literacy. A further obstacle to the creation of a buoyant market for print was linguistic disunity. During the seventeenth century the majority of inhabitants spoke Irish rather than English, although bilingualism was growing and became widespread in the eighteenth century (Ní Mhunghaile 2012: 218–42). Printing in the Irish language posed technical and ideological difficulties and remained rare. Moreover, while the bulk of the population used Irish, only a few could read it. The absence of newspapers in the Irish vernacular was one of several factors that speeded the adoption of English, not only as the language of government and commerce, but for information, entertainment and routine tasks. Until the late seventeenth century Ireland relied for print, including news-­sheets and diurnals, on shipments from England, Scotland and continental Europe. Whereas the civil wars of the 1640s had stimulated the production of topical accounts in Britain, Ireland, although drawn into the ­fighting – ­a ‘War of Three Kingdoms’ – did not see the local printing of news. Printed propaganda was issued by the competing sides, but it remained stubbornly utilitarian in purpose and content. Only in 1660 did a newspaper appear in Dublin comparable to those which had been published regularly in London throughout the 1640s and 1650s. An account of the chief occurrences was linked with the meeting of a representative assembly. It gave a terse summary of decisions taken by the body summoned to prepare for the restoration of the Stuart monarch in the three kingdoms. 239

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An account prefigured a longer-­ lasting news-­ sheet – Mercurius Hibernicus – in 1663. It boasted of being ‘the first attempt of this nature in Ireland’ (Mercurius Hibernicus, 1, 13–21 January 1662[3]). Its appearance was occasioned partly by the meeting of a Parliament in Dublin. However, it had been sitting intermittently since 1661, and additional impetus was given by the controversial activities of a Court of Claims. The latter was adjudicating the contests for possession of estates between displaced owners, usually Catholic, and new ones, typically Protestant. The acrimony unsettled public affairs and led to the effective suspension of Parliament and the termination of the Court. Mercurius Hibernicus ceased. In publicising the wrangles, it was thought to have contributed to them. The short duration of the publication resulted from government intervention. As in England and Scotland, the authorities viewed askance the circulation of information from unofficial and often unknown sources. Thereafter the Dublin administration sought to monitor what appeared from the presses. With only two printers active in the capital, surveillance was not too difficult. Harder and in the end impossible was the stopping of printed news from elsewhere entering the island. Official jumpiness about the disturbing effects of newspapers would continue over the next century, together with attempts to control and even to suppress both local and imported publications. Eventually, the apparent failure of the negative ­approach – ­banning or seizing the illicit and ­inflammatory – ­led the government to issue its own news-­sheets and to subsidise others. The next event in Ireland likely to excite the press was the revelation in England of a Popish Plot, allegedly to replace the monarch with a Catholic, Charles II’s brother, the Duke of York (the future James VII and II). Given the overwhelmingly Catholic affiliation of the Irish and their record of rebellions, it was feared that Ireland would join in the conspiracies. Contrary to predictions, Ireland was little troubled, and it was still the mercuries arriving from Britain, not any locally published ones, which recounted developments. Signs of greater Irish journalistic activity can be detected when James ascended the throne in 1685. The News-Letter started: the work of a Dublin bookseller, Robert Thornton, and a busy printer, Joseph Ray. It reproduced in a crudely printed half-­ folio the contents of the manuscript newsletters that had long been sent from England to Ireland. An official organ, the Dublin Gazette, may also have been produced. A cryptic note early in 1688 on a manuscript account of the new charter for the corporation of Galway states that it was ‘to be put into the gazette’ (‘The reception of the charter by the maior of Galway on Wednesday the 21 March 1687/8’, NLI, Ms.

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38,822/1; Munter 1960: vii). If so, no copy has survived. Thornton and Ray, with others in the Dublin print trade, were involved in a successor publication, the Dublin Intelligence, between 1690 and 1693, after the regime changed and William III and Mary II took the crown. The fighting in Ireland between the two kings initially supplied ample copy, but as peace returned, the contents were dominated by British and foreign material. Ray had actively challenged the legal monopoly hitherto conferred on a single printer in Dublin through a royal patent (Pollard 1980: 79–95). The ending of this privilege was one reason why print, including newspapers, proliferated from the 1690s. He has been described as ‘an energetic and obstinate, perhaps pig-­headed, fighter’ (Pollard 2000: 482). As such, he is one of the first members of the Irish print trades to achieve prominence. Some, following Ray’s example, became conspicuous in civic and public affairs, and aligned with particular factions. As the number of printers in Dublin increased, they were tempted into potentially lucrative ventures, not always with success. Gradually growing prosperity brought a greater demand for newspapers. Then, too, the febrile political atmosphere, with the rivalries between Whigs and Tories reproduced in Ireland, heated arguments over the ­relationship – ­theoretical and ­working – ­between England and Ireland, and opposition to specific measures generated debate. Parliament, which until 1692 had met irregularly, thereafter became a fixture, assembling every second year (Forbes 2018). Dublin, as well as increasing in ­population – ­approximately 125,000 by ­1750 – ­became a focus for visitors from the provinces, attracted by the range of commodities, services and diversions on offer. Newspapers cashed in, advertising many of these and in themselves constituting an entertainment. As modest prosperity spread, so too did literacy, making it more likely that newspapers would find buyers and readers. Levels of functional literacy were highest in Dublin and other populous cities, and in the north-­east, and were higher among men than women (Barnard 1998: 209–35; Connolly 2008: 161–2, 338–9). Being able to read a paper for oneself was hardly essential when they were so often read aloud in a domestic or sociable setting. Similarly, the ability to buy a copy for oneself did not always determine access. Being passed an old copy, sharing, availability in taverns, coffee houses and dedicated reading rooms and clubs all allowed a look at the printed news. Commercial premises and institutions usually subscribed to an assortment of titles, some British and others continental European (Archbold 2010: 138–62). By the 1790s the Dublin Library Society had developed from

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gatherings in a bookshop. Soon it had its own rooms and a supervisory committee; it charged one guinea yearly to members. Initially it excluded newspapers, but this ban was quickly rescinded, and its ‘conversation room’ was furnished with papers which cost an annual £140. Thereby it was thought that ‘a literary reading society’ was converted into a ‘political newspaper club’ (MacWilliam 1925: 120–3). Communal settings encouraged discussion, argument and contradiction; listeners were at the mercy of readers who selected and summarised, and of mishearing and misunderstanding (Ȯ Ciȯsaín 1997: 186–91; Higgins 2010: 34–5). Thirty-­seven differently titled newspapers are known to have been published during Queen Anne’s reign, but only six survived for long. The thirty-­ three begun in the next reign, of George I (1714–27), achieved greater stability, with fifteen continuing longer. Overall, between 1726 and 1769, it has been concluded that seventy different newspapers were published, but only eight survived for any length of time (Munter 1967: 62). By 1774 there were fourteen separate newspaper titles being published regularly in Dublin. By then, too, they were appearing in provincial towns, notably Belfast, Cork, Limerick, Waterford and Kilkenny. Eighteenth-­century Ireland was divided in many ways: status, income, ancestry, gender, age, upbringing, language, literacy and attitudes. Whether or not the printed news-­sheets widened these divisions remains uncertain, although the likelihood must be that they did. More positively, they united those of similar opinions and tastes even when scattered across the entire island, and so created imagined communities through shared reading matter (Herman 2020: 52). In 1745 it was remarked that, for updates on the fighting in Europe, Catholics consulted Pue’s Occurrences and Protestants, Faulkner’s Dublin Journal (Barnard 2017: 65). Yet it remained the case that chance as much as calculation determined what was printed in a paper. Reports included in a Clonmel journal in 1776 came from ‘a French gentleman lately arrived’ and the writer of ‘a private letter from Philadelphia’ (Burke 1907: 348). Newspapers were usually printed on existing presses, giving their owners extra revenue between more substantial jobs. If occasionally a new journalistic scheme required the essential equipment, a second-­ hand printing press with type could be bought relatively cheaply. In 1786 it was calculated that a press for a project in Limerick would cost twelve guineas, but the type over £60 (Herbert 1942: 106–8). The type might be worn through repeated use and therefore produced a smudgy or indistinct page. Paper added further expense and here too the quality varied greatly. Efforts were made by the patriotic to use Irish-­made

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Figure 10.1  The Limerick Chronicle, 14 June 1797 (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin)

paper, but both price and availability frequently frustrated good intentions. Flimsy and porous papers reduced legibility and durability. Once printed, the results had to be sold and distributed. Hawkers, newsboys and chapmen operated in Dublin. One was vividly drawn in 1760 by Hugh Douglas Hamilton. Around that time, a wealthy Ulster family staying in Dublin paid a ‘newsboy’ eight pence for four weeks’ news (Account book of Annesleys, 1761–1766, s.d. 16 January 1761, PRONI,

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D 1854/8/17; Laffan 2003: 128–9). It is likely that tradesmen in the capital included newspapers in their consignments despatched into the country. Pedlars and itinerant salesmen also stuffed papers into their packs. With improved roads and postal services, it became easier to disseminate the printed news. In 1774 one Limerick newspaper was available from twenty-­two agents within a fifty-­mile radius of the city. The Northern Star in the 1790s made use of existing networks of traders and political sympathisers to achieve a formidable team of ninety-­ three distributors (Callaghan 2010, I: 92; O’Brien 1998: 13–14). Invariably, subscribers outside the larger towns had to pay more for delivery. In 1768 country customers for the Limerick Chronicle were charged double the annual 5s 5d required from city residents. By 1788 easier travel with better roads reduced the differential to 17s 4d in town and £1 1s 8d in rural areas. Deliveries could prove erratic; unreliability sometimes persuaded subscribers to cancel their orders or to switch to another title (Callaghan 2010, I: 89–124; Kennedy 1998: 79–83; Munter 1967: 63, 65, 79–82). A system of licensing of the hawkers had been introduced in 1733 and by 1746 the yearly licence cost £1, with another £1 payable for a horse, donkey or ass to carry the sheets. The charges were doubled in 1785. Further restrictions had been introduced with the Press Act in 1784 (Pollard 1989: 29, 30), whereby the authorities tried to control what might legally be sold. The licensed sellers were identified by badges. However, control was frequently evaded, so that scurrilous papers, broadsides and ‘flying news’ were cried up in the streets (Laffan 2003: 34–5, 110–11). Some aspirations of the promoters of newspapers were set out in a prospectus for a projected newcomer in 1774. The General Evening Post would appear three times weekly from Dublin. Uniquely, because it was printed in the evening, it would take advantage of what had just arrived in the port on the packet boats. Unnamed news collectors would be active in all parts of the capital. The editor would be careful to select only ‘the authentic correspondence’ with Europe, America and the main towns of Great Britain and Ireland. It aimed at impartiality, and invited pieces in prose or verse from ‘ingenious members of the university and others’. It had agents in Belfast to receive advertisements there (Belfast News-Letter, 24–28 December 1773). This venture was either short-­lived or still-­born. Its failure did not, however, discourage others from fresh attempts. In 1778 a Dublin Evening Journal was proposed. In the intervening four years, the mood had darkened with ‘military defeats’ in America and ‘loss of liberty’. The manifesto

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lamented recent interventions to destroy the liberty of the press, with ‘mutilated gazettes and ministerial essays and paragraphs’ and bribery by paying loyalist journals to publish proclamations. The new publication was designed for ‘the gentleman, scholar and man of commercial life’. It would sell for 1½ pence, and come out three times each week. Domestic tidings would consist of ‘promotions, proceedings of corporations, marriages, births, deaths, accidents, robberies, murders, committals, trials, executions’. Commodity prices current in Dublin, shipping arrivals and bills of mortality were to be included. ‘Essays, anecdotes, poetry’ were solicited, and summaries of books and pamphlets published in England, extracted from the London Review, were promised. The paper, which changed its name soon after it started, did not last the year (An Evening News Paper [Dublin, 1778], in RIA, Broadsides, 3 B 53/225; Pollard 2000: 470). Parliament itself catered to demands for a published record of its proceedings. It authorised the publication of its actions in Votes. Intended as a simple factual summary, what was selected for inclusion sometimes caused disagreement (Barnard 2014: 97–113). The House of Commons sheltered behind parliamentary privilege to condemn unauthorised reports. As a result, errant publishers and printers could find themselves imprisoned for the duration of a parliamentary session for transgressing. Blatant partisanship was absent from Votes. Not so with the more capacious newspapers which deliberately appealed to buyers and readers aligned with specific political outlooks. Print, both pamphlets and newspapers, was a weapon favoured by the protagonists. Efforts were made to silence the most provocative, with those found to be importing, selling or printing them harassed, interrogated and even imprisoned. The government, without any formal licensing system before 1784, resorted to the cumbersome process of accusations for seditious and personal libel (Kelly 2008: 143, 160–1, 167, 171–2). Success in proving these charges depended on persuading Grand Juries to approve indictments and then on juries convicting the accused (Kelly 2008: 142–4). Such trials frequently failed. Even if they succeeded, the authorities risked turning printers, publishers and booksellers into popular heroes. The fact that George Faulkner was twice tried for seditious libel in the 1720s and 1730s probably assisted his rising reputation, so that by the mid-­century he was the best-­known and most respected figure in the Irish print trade (Barnard 2017: 349–50; Pollard 2000: 198–206; Ward 1972: 8, 10, 24–5). A change in the way in which newspapers affected the practice of parliamentary politics can be discerned in the announcements

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Figure 10.2  Votes of the House of Commons, 1 July 1707 (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin)

concerning elections. Between 1715 and 1761 these occurred only irregularly. General elections were held after the accession of a new ­monarch – ­in 1715, 1727 and 1761. By-­elections to fill vacancies happened unpredictably. Notices were inserted in the papers to summon electors, many of whom were not resident in the constituency and lived at a distance. The dates, times and place of the poll were stated. In 1727 it was advertised that coaches would be waiting outside a Dublin tavern to transport electors to the poll in County Meath (Faulkner’s Dublin Journal, 21–24 October 1727). With voting continuing for several days, Dublin papers which were published two or three times in the week printed details of how many votes had so far been cast for each candidate. It was a device to spur laggards into casting their votes. Partisanship coloured the reports. One candidate in County Tipperary, Colonel James Dawson, withdrew from the contest on ‘the pretext of a stone being thrown and hitting his father’. Moreover, it was stressed that Dawson’s opponents were attended by ‘those of best

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figure and condition in their country [county]’ (Faulkner’s Dublin Journal, 28–31 October 1727). More slowly, manifestos from intending candidates were published. Necessarily these were brief and concentrated on readily understood ­principles – s­ uch as ‘independence’ and ‘liberty’ – which distinguished one contender from his rivals (Faulkner’s Dublin Journal, 25–29 April 1727, 2–6 May 1727, 30 May–3 June 1727, 26–29 August 1727; Fleming 2010: 46; The Public Register: or Freeman’s Journal, 19–23 June 1764). In 1741 the two competitors in a local by-­election set out their claims in the Limerick Journal (Callaghan 2010, I: 50). During 1760–61 the newspapers were much used by rivals as they limbered up for the contest. Once the Octennial Act had been passed (in 1767) and elections became more frequent and regular, candidates’ recourse to the press was routine. It coincided with the beginnings of sustained and critical commentary on current affairs in the newspapers, notably the Freeman’s Journal, rather than the haphazard reportage that had predominated hitherto. Eighteenth-­ century Ireland was punctuated by successive political excitements. From the furore over the patent granted in 1724 to the Wolverhampton iron-­ founder, William Wood, to coin copper halfpenny pieces, through demands for municipal and constitutional changes orchestrated in Dublin by Charles Lucas at the end of the 1740s, to the controversy over a Money Bill in 1753 and whether it was for the Irish Parliament or the English government to decide on the allocation of funds, discontent spilled from the narrow confines of the Dublin Parliament into a larger constituency. Lucas, an apothecary with political ambitions, started a newspaper, the Censor, to disseminate his views. As earlier in the Wood’s halfpence fracas, terse reports in the paper were simultaneously expanded into broadsides, handbills and flimsy pamphlets. When attributing influence over behaviour and thinking, it is misleading to try to separate the newspaper coverage from the other printed forms. Soon protagonists collected together the columns they had written for the press and published them as separate tracts. The rising temperature climbed higher during the 1760s as the Lord Lieutenant sought to change the way in which Ireland was governed, taking a more direct role himself rather than relying on local ‘undertakers’. Concurrently, overseas wars threatened the island’s security with possible invasion. At home, agrarian unrest seemed endemic (Watt 2018). The last quarter of the century brought crises in quick succession: first the shock waves of the American War of Independence, then the French Revolution and the consequent war

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with France. During the 1780s Ireland’s legal and trading relationship with Britain was altered, with the Dublin Parliament acquiring greater powers. Yet dissatisfaction continued among those who felt that Parliament required reform, that legal disabilities on Catholics and Protestant dissenters should be relaxed or ended altogether, and that the examples of republican America and France should be copied. Uprisings occurred in 1798, which were brutally suppressed and followed by an enforced legislative union of Ireland with Great Britain in 1800. Early in the 1780s the Volunteering movement, which united civic activism and military preparedness against invaders, produced two papers at variance with the government. The inflammatory outbursts in the press of Matthew Carey, an impetuous young Dubliner, led to his flight to Paris, where he worked throughout 1782 for Benjamin Franklin. Returning to Dublin, Carey, a ‘seditious scribbler’, was set up by his prosperous Catholic father with the Volunteer’s Journal. Carey’s printed exhortations were thought to have incited a mob to invade the Parliament building. The members of Parliament voted the Volunteer’s Journal ‘a daring, false, scandalous and seditious libel on the proceedings of the house’, and had Carey apprehended. To counter the radicals, the Volunteer Evening Post was started, but failed to gain many subscribers (Powell 2010: 113–35). Defenders of the government, such as the ponderous and self-­ regarding Gorges Edmond Howard, were no match for the gadflies who stung the regime in the newspaper columns. The versatile but erratic Henry Brooke briefly edited the Freeman’s Journal between 1763 and 1764, contributing sixty-­five pieces as ‘Watchman’. Aspiring authors tried their hands at journalism. Brooke, an eccentric squire and a successful if controversial playwright, was one of several happy to experiment with assorted literary genres (Barnard 2017: 257–8; Donlan 2009: 874–5). Frederick Jebb, a gynaecologist at the Dublin Lying-­In hospital, had first written to the Freeman’s Journal on the question of medical training. However, with the threat of French invasion and the upsurge of Volunteering in 1779 he published a series of fiercely patriotic letters. These were then reprinted as Letters of Guatomozin, evoking the resistance of the Mexican hero to the Spanish invader Cortes. The unsettling impact so alarmed the Lord Lieutenant that he proposed pensioning Jebb in a bid to swing him over to the government’s cause (Andrews 2009; Herman 2020: 61; Powell 2010: 119). The brouhaha around Carey prompted the tougher Press Act of 1784. It required one hefty £500 recognisance from the proprietor

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before a newspaper could be published and a further surety of £500. In addition, the workers in the print-­room and the vendors were circumscribed. The heavy requirements gradually stifled the opposition press. Carey emigrated to Philadelphia, where he embarked on a long and profitable publishing career (Higgins 2014: 176–200; Kelly 2014: 201–43; Pollard 2000: 194–5). Both his short stay in Paris and then his removal to America remind one of the links between the publishers and writers in Ireland and a wider, mainly Anglophone world. George Douglas, founder of the Londonderry Journal (1772), and Thomas Magee, brother of the leading Belfast printer James Magee, were others who left Ireland for more receptive America (Barnard 2017: 320, 321; Munter 1988: 82; O’Connor 2011: 193–5). Trade and emigration created and sustained strong contacts with North America. Published accounts, notably in the Belfast NewsLetter, aimed to persuade would-­be emigrants to sail to the New World. Along the same routes, ideas of resistance, liberty and republicanism travelled. Through newspapers and other cheap forms of print, these notions were believed to be permeating sections of the Irish population, especially in the north (Ulster) which had especially strong ties across the Atlantic (Bankhurst 2013: 31–58; Bric 2008: 194–5; Morley 2002: 187–211). Contagion through contact and through print was also believed to enter Ireland from France. Traders, priests and travellers were suspected of bringing unsettling ideas of rationalism, enlightenment, equality, fraternity and republicanism, particularly after 1789 (Gargett and Sheridan 1999; Gillen 2005: 15, 36–9; Gough and Dickson 1990; Kennedy 2001; Keogh 1993: 120–1). As an island with a coastline impossible to police completely, Ireland was vulnerable to the entry of subversives and of subversive print. Even so, it was London that remained the most familiar supplier. Copy from outside Ireland was shamelessly reproduced in the Irish prints, and so too were the language, preoccupations and techniques of the English newspapers. The statutes of 1774, 1784 and 1785, obliging newspapers to pay a duty on each number, raised the price for which they were sold. It also led to higher rates for advertisements, with a resultant drop in their numbers. The decline in advertising revenue threatened the continuation of some titles and left them open to government blandishments, which, in return for supporting the regime, would favour them with more official business. Through this device, and a new proprietor, Francis Higgins, the independently minded Freeman’s Journal was brought to heel. Higgins, an unsavoury and unscrupulous character, informed on confrères in the print business (Powell 2005: 97–8;

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Bartlett 2004). The sums spent from the secret service fund on suborning the press increased from £4,100 in 1785 to £7,000 by 1795 (Inglis 1954: 37–8, 53; Pollard 1989: 29). Meanwhile, the owners, publishers and printers of at least five newspapers were harried in the courts (Kelly 2008: 167–72). In comparison with the earlier vivacity of the press, by the 1790s it was muted, if not muzzled through harassment and bribery. Of the ten newspapers published in Dublin during the 1780s, by the following decade half had ceased publication and none was aligned with the opposition (Pollard 1989: 29). One notable exception to the prevailing complaisance was the Northern Star, started by a Belfast consortium in 1792. Consisting of four pages and priced at two pence, it offered a more radical perspective than the venerable Belfast News-Letter, and was said to be read with ‘avidity’ (Woods 1991: 112). In contrast to the Belfast News-Letter with a print run of 2,750, it had one of 4,000. This not only outstripped its Ulster competitor, but also the most popular Dublin title, the Dublin Evening Post, reckoned to sell between 2,500 and 3,000 copies (Robert 2004: 36, 40). A far-­reaching distribution system was quickly established, extending deep into the Ulster countryside and embracing Dublin, Cork and Waterford, as well as Glasgow. In 1792 it focused on news from France, acquired through intermediaries rather than on the spot. It advocated thoroughgoing parliamentary reform and, expressing the United Irishmen’s ambition, aimed to bind together Catholics and Protestant dissenters (Curtin 1994: 204–5; MacDonald 1997: 54–68; O’Brien 1998: 7–32). The Northern Star, repeatedly attacked, closed in 1797, with its equipment destroyed by renegade soldiers. Such was the intimidation that one Belfast reader took the precaution of having her copy delivered to another address for fear of having her own house ransacked (Agnew 1999, II: 347). A few years before, supporters of the Northern Star were said to have assaulted carriers distributing the rival Belfast News-Letter (Musgrave 1995: 153). A successor, the Press, emerged in Dublin during 1797 but lasted less than a year (Inglis 1954: 98–104). Then a lone Dublin autodidact, Walter Cox (originally a bricklayer), sought to fill the gap with Union Star. This was little better than a handbill to be pasted up in public places. Because of its intemperance, urging the assassination of the leaders of official reaction, Union Star was disowned by moderate reformers. Rightly they feared that its extremism was playing into the hands of government by inviting suppression (Curtin 1994: 213–27). In the aftermath of the 1798 rising, blame was heaped on ‘the abuse and prostitution of the press’ (Day 1798: 25). The reach and effect of

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the few surviving critical journals, notably the Northern Star, were deplored and perhaps exaggerated. An indignant Church of Ireland incumbent from County Down ridiculed the village shopkeeper, scanning the newspaper spread on his counter, and pontificating about the state of Europe (Moore 1798, quoted in Keogh 1993: 120). For Sir Richard Musgrave, a landowner in the south and the most voluminous early chronicler of the rebellion, the Northern Star was a ‘noted vehicle of treason and sedition’ (Musgrave 1995: 76, 92, 138, 153). A lawyer Member of Parliament, descanting on the degradation of the Irish press ‘into a filthy receptacle and sewer of every thing vile’, traced it to malign French interference. Extravagantly he claimed ‘our Press is become the indented [?indentured] property of the enemy [France]’ (Day 1798: 25). In one sense, these allegations had a foundation. An early analyst of the Irish press during this troubled period commented on the generous coverage accorded by the moderate Saunders’s NewsLetter to events outside Ireland and Britain. Simply through the selection of what was printed, not through editorial comment, ideas and actions current in continental Europe and North America reached Ireland (Inglis 1954: 84). Even before revolution engulfed France, the interested in Ireland were kept abreast of developments there, with many publications imported or summarised in periodicals and paragraphs in the papers (Gargett and Sheridan 1999; Gough and Dickson 1990; Kennedy 2001). Given the tumultuous public events during the period, the extent to which the newspapers reported and may have affected these has been the main concern of most historians of the press. Increasingly, though, as changes in the daily lives of Ireland’s inhabitants have attracted closer scrutiny, the relationship of the newspapers to these developments is being explored. Advertisements were vital to the survival of papers. In 1777 Saunders’s News Letter proposed daily publication in Dublin in order to accommodate the many advertisements (Belfast News-Letter, 7–11 March 1777). Payment for them, although often slow in coming or never arriving, financed the operation. Brief insertions of one or two lines cost a minimum of 2s or 2s 6d. Repeated printings were discounted. A notice about standing timber for sale in 1739 was inserted fifteen times in Faulkner’s Dublin paper for £1 0s 7d (G. Faulkner, receipt, 4 May 1739, Howard (Wicklow) Mss, NLI, PC 223(4)). The Stamp Act of 1774 imposed a surcharge of two pence on each advertisement, which was raised to six pence in 1780. The resulting increase was passed to the advertisers through higher rates (Kennedy 1998: 78). From the 1740s, the need to accommodate advertisements changed the size and look of papers. Typically, they

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were enlarged to two folio sheets, making four pages, and the contents compressed with smaller typefaces. Extraneous matter, notably crude illustrative woodcuts, was dropped (Munter 1967: 58–9, 63). Typography and layout hardly assisted the reader, particularly if ‘hasty’ and searching for a specific item (Skelton 1744: 1–3). Generally the four or five columns of type were undifferentiated, other than by occasional headings in larger and bolder type and pointing fingers to draw attention to paragraphs. In 1750 a Protestant bishop wanted a notice about a robbery inserted into Faulkner’s Dublin Journal. Faulkner was to be told ‘he’ll oblige me by printing it with some mark that may catch the eye of his readers’. Also, he suspected that the publisher might not oblige if the request was delivered by a mere servant (Legg 1996: 261). Crude woodcuts were used by some publications to denote shipping advertisements and reports. Even then, the signposting was not always helpful. A column in the Dublin Evening Post in 1785 was titled in larger letters ‘Stallions’, and offered details of horses either for sale or available at stud. Embedded in the column was a resolution agreed by the Grand Jury of County Longford (Dublin Evening Post, 26 March 1785). Only close and systematic reading would sift the wheat from the printed chaff. The multiplicity of advertisements, once overlooked or ignored as trivial, is now being analysed. Before the newspapers solicited them, printed handbills posted up in public places had sufficed. Such notices continued to be used in conjunction with the newspaper advertisements (O. Gallagher to O. St George, 24 July 1725, 12 and 19 July 1726; J. Cooke to same, 24 June 1726; F. Anderson to same, 13 August 1726, TNA, C 110/46/377, 431, 433, 435, 439; D. Graisbery, Ledger of printing work, s.d. 15 April 1780, 1 July 1780, 26 August 1780, 25 October 1780, TCD, Ms, 10314, pp 23, 26, 27, 29). Lord Doneraile, temporarily in Dublin, asked a correspondent in north Cork to send Limerick and Cork newspapers simply so that he could read the advertisements (Doneraile to J. Crone, 8 February 1763, Crone of Byblox Mss, box 1, Cork Archives Institute, PR3). Another substantial landowner, who was paying £5 a year for newspapers, probably English as well as Irish, spent £7 14s 7d with Faulkner on advertising (R. Howard, account book, s.d. 15 February 1748[9], 3 May 1750, NLI, Ms. 1725). Early studies of musical performances and the theatre exploited the unique detail in the press notices (Boydell 1998; 1992; Clark 1955; 1965; Greene 2011; see Figure 10.3). Through such analyses, the reach of the journals can be gauged, together with changing consumer tastes and the arrival of novelties. It would be misleading to classify the goods advertised simply as luxuries. To make it worthwhile to pay

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Figure 10.3  Dublin’s Public Advertiser; or, The Theatrical Chronicle, 15–18 October 1773; this specialised in theatre advertisements and news (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin)

for advertisements, the commodities on offer had either to be of reasonable value or in considerable volume. It is true that butchers and fishmongers did not resort to newspaper advertising (Kennedy 1998: 77–8; Munter 1967: 59). But even some dealing in unusual or apparently exotic foods did. An alluring but perhaps confusing melange of the unfamiliar was purveyed by Benjamin Luffingham in central Dublin. In his shop were to be found ‘choice Berkley, North Wiltshire, Gloucester and Cheshire ­cheese . . . r­ emarkable for richness and flavour’. Luffingham also sold Dorchester, Bristol and Wiltshire beer, sweet cider, brown stout and London porter. Nearby, another trader stocked Gloucester and Cheshire cheese alongside ‘Yarmouth red herrings’ and a selection of teas (Saunders’s News-Letter, 23 March 1774, 3 July 1775, 30 October 1780). Medicines were much in demand. Typical of the elixirs which raised the hopes of the credulous was ‘Turlington’s balsam of life’, graced with the king’s patent (Saunders’s News-Letter, 3 July 1775).

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By the 1780s several Dublin traders in ceramics offered through the newspapers ready-­crated dinner and tea services, which could be despatched into the provinces (Barnard 2021). These were household necessities, albeit ones that spoke of changing fashions and designs. Clothing and varieties of cloth were also frequently touted, sometimes as novelties (Greene and McCrum 1990: 153–72). The growing choice of such everyday goods, both home-­produced and imported, can be traced through the newspapers. Shopkeepers, nervous over possible boycotts or physical attack during the violent campaign against imports in 1779, might stress in print the Irish origin of their stock. A worried Dublin trader announced, ‘the glass being the only sort of goods that he deals in that is manufactured here, he is determined not to import any till an alteration in the affairs in this kingdom takes place’ (Saunders’s News-Letter, 11 September 1779; Herman 2020: 51–69). Printed descriptions, unsupported by illustrations, frequently used an unfamiliar, even arcane language, so that without ocular inspection a prospective buyer would struggle to envisage what was being sold. Moreover, a vocabulary of hyperbole quickly evolved. As with political concepts, so with concrete objects, imagination was required of readers in order to understand and envisage them. In the summer of 1775 a visitor to Dublin lost his watch on a drunken night on the town. In order to recover it, he first had handbills printed. When this stratagem failed, he advertised the loss in Faulkner’s Dublin Journal. The watch was quickly recovered (J. Murray, Journal, s.d. 26 and 28 June 1775, NLS, Ms. 43018, pp 107, 110). Watches, if mislaid or purloined, were readily identifiable by maker and an engraved number and were of sufficient value to justify the expense of an advertisement (D. Graisbery, Ledger of printing work, s.d. 25 October 1780, TCD, Ms, 10314, p. 29; Belfast NewsLetter, 10 October 1760; Saunders’s News-Letter, 24 March 1774, 31 May 1775, 23 August 1775). The miscellany advertised encompassed lost or strayed livestock, situations vacant, specialist tuition, money to invest or lend, appeals for charity, newly published books, horse races, cock-­fights and other diversions, and the temporary presence in town of dentists, painters, modellers in wax, seal-­engravers, singers, actors and lecturers. Formal recantations by Catholics appeared in Limerick papers; notices of forthcoming charity sermons elsewhere (Callaghan 2010, I: 135). Some papers included a ‘Poet’s Corner’, where verses sent in by readers appeared (Burke 1907: 347; Callaghan 2010, I: 184, 207; Robert 2004: 15). A few of James Jenkins’s verses collected together in a volume of Juvenile Poems in 1773 had previously appeared in the Waterford

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Journal. In 1797 William Drennan had a poem printed in the short-­ lived radical Press (Agnew 1999, II: 342: Barnard 2017: 287). The opinionated appreciated the power of the press. Jonathan Swift directed his talents into satire and verse. Late in the 1740s Lucas saw how a newspaper could publicise his programme of civic and institutional reforms. The indictment of Townshend’s viceroyalty had been published in instalments in Freeman’s Journal before it appeared as Baratariana in 1772 (Kelly 2006: 227–8). The County Dublin Member of Parliament from 1776 until the Union, Sir Edward Newenham, forwarded an assortment of causes through newspaper columns. To this end, he assumed several identities: ‘Brutus’, ‘Leonidas’, ‘Junius’ (Kelly 2004: 14–15, 39–40, 116, 293–4). Other activists such as Jebb and Drennan tried the same strategy. Conservatives, while deploring the way in which newspapers challenged authority and conventions, acknowledged their influence. Readers are more often credited with credulity than with scepticism. Faced with a variety of ­sources – ­different newspapers with contradictory stories, private letters and c­ onversation – p ­ ublished information was not always trusted. Whereas scurrility, mockery and disrespect had amused in the earlier part of the century, when upheavals and violence engulfed continental Europe and spread into Ireland in the 1790s, the intemperance of the few remaining radical newspapers may not have been widely approved. In any case, their number had dwindled almost to nothing. If the politicisation, patriot militancy and radicalism evident earlier in the century owed a good deal to the press, backing for the government and the established order in the later 1790s might be ­attributed – a­ t least in p ­ art – t­o the conformist tone of the surviving newspapers (Dickson 2000: 217: Gillen 2005: 224–51). Even then, the press still offered the readiest way to follow the fluctuating fortunes of war, with which so many from Ireland were concerned, as also, through the advertisements, to locate desired goods, services and novelties.

Case Study 8: Ireland’s First Newspaper: Mercurius Hibernicus and the Court of Claims, 1663 Colum Kenny Samuel Dancer and the Court of Claims The publisher of Mercurius Hibernicus, Samuel Dancer, was an enterprising bookseller on Dublin’s Castle Street. Dancer’s premises were at the sign of the Horse-­shoe, next door to The Bear and Ragged-­Staffe. It was right in the heart

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of the city, on what had long been its main artery leading from Dublin Castle along by the pillory and Christ Church Cathedral to the city’s High Street. A visitor to Dublin twenty-­five years later described Castle Street as ‘the most considerable street in the town, where the richest merchants, goldsmiths, mercers & other tradesmen of eminent dealing dwell’. Today it is rather dull, its chief arterial function supplanted by Lord Edward Street. Among Dancer’s publications, besides Mercurius Hibernicus, was the text of Pompey: A Tragedy. This was a new translation by Katherine Philips of a play written by Pierre Corneille, to which she added songs between the acts to entertain her audiences. Philips was a British poet who wrote Pompey while living in Ireland for over a year. The play was regarded as a success and, in its day, seen as a metaphor for reconciliation. Recently it has been rediscovered and analysed by feminists for other reasons. When staged at Dublin’s new theatre in Smock Alley in 1663 it caused ‘a fashionable flutter’. It is thought to have been the first occasion on which a play written by a woman was given a public performance in English, in either Britain or Ireland. Dancer also published verses by Katherine Philips in a collection of poetry that he produced in 1663. He published also, for official bodies, a range of less remarkable material such as statutes and proclamations. There was then still great uncertainty in Ireland about the future, not least because swathes of Irish land had been taken from Catholics and royalists and granted or promised to others. By the Restoration in 1660, most Irish land had passed into Protestant hands. Might it all be handed back? What could be done to satisfy various factions? Those who had suppressed rebellion in Ireland since 1641 were owed something, but those who had followed Charles II into exile after the execution of his father also expected recompense. So many claims and promises were in the air that the Duke of Ormond famously exclaimed, ‘there must be new discoveries made of a new Ireland, for the old will not serve to satisfy these engagements’. No new Ireland was discovered and, although the king and Ormond were tolerant of Catholics and were distrusted by others for that reason, they nevertheless firmly supported the Protestant establishment. Some Catholics recovered their property, but the overall Catholic share of Irish land fell drastically during the seventeenth c­ entury – ­to 14 per cent around the end of the century. In 1663 that outcome was still in the future, and a special new Court of Claims struggled to square the circle of land ownership by resolving a small proportion of the many questions of title. By August 1663, when the period prescribed by the Act of Settlement 1662 for hearing claims ended, the commissioners had dealt with some 800 cases and issued 700 decrees of innocency, but there were thousands of claimants waiting to be heard. Samuel Dancer reported the court’s decisions in Mercurius Hibernicus. He also included in his edition of Katherine Philips’s play an epilogue written

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by Sir Edward Dering MP, one of the commissioners of the Court of Claims and a friend of Philips.

Mercurius Hibernicus During the seventeenth century, publications that are today regarded as Britain’s first newspapers very gradually emerged. Some efforts to identify Ireland’s earliest newspaper have overlooked the weekly Mercurius Hibernicus of 1663. Robert Munter, in his Hand-List of Irish Newspapers 1685–1750 (1960: vii), dismissed it as one of the ‘crude forerunners of journalism in Ireland’. This was harsh. Munter made amends later, in his History of the Irish Newspaper 1685–1760 (1967: 7–8), by describing Mercurius Hibernicus as ‘by any definition’ an Irish newspaper and ‘the first attempt to meet a genuine public demand for printed news’ in Ireland. It addressed an English-­speaking readership on a largely Irish-­speaking island, doing so in a very conflicted society divided by recent war and land grabs. In Ireland in late 1649 or early 1650 a single issue of a publication styling itself the Irish Monthly Mercury had appeared. Printed in Cork, this was largely a Cromwellian narrative of events in Ireland that was seemingly meant to bolster Cromwellian morale. It demonised those it termed ‘filthy Teigs’ (native Irish Catholics) and ‘Cavaleers [sic]’ (royalists). Given its nature, it does not qualify as ‘Ireland’s first newspaper’. A decade later, in Dublin in 1660, Sir Charles Coote and others supporting the restoration of the monarchy brought out a few numbers of a weekly publication for readers in Ireland that was intended to further the royalist cause. But it, like the Cromwellian Mercury in Cork a decade earlier, more properly belongs to a contemporary genre known in England as ‘newsbooks’. Samuel Dancer’s Mercurius Hibernicus of 1663 was different in style from those earlier titles. This was a commercial venture aimed at a broader English-­ speaking readership in Ireland and had some of the hallmarks of a modern newspaper. It was informative in a general way, including news from Ireland and abroad. It carried weekly details of developments in the controversial Court of Claims in Dublin and thus was the first example of regular Irish court reporting. Mercurius Hibernicus also published items that might today be described as sensational or ‘tabloid’. The paper even invited advertising, announcing in its second number that, Whereas the Publication of private concernments, [such] as things lost, &c. is many times necessarie for the better retrieval, or management of things, these may certifie that if any Person have any such businesse to be made publick; it shall be done on convenient terms if they please to communicate it to Samuel Dancer.

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The title of Dancer’s paper was derived from the Roman god and messenger of the gods Mercury, whose name has graced the mastheads of many newspapers down the centuries. At least fifteen issues of Dancer’s Mercurius Hibernicus appeared. Its launch issue in January 1663 (13–20 January) was subtitled ‘Irelands [sic] Intelligencer: concerning transactions both domestic and foreign’. From the second issue (20–27 January 1663) the subtitle ‘Irelands Intelligencer’ became ‘The Irish Intelligencer’. On the front page of the launch issue was a declaration that, This being the first attempt of this nature in Ireland, the printer thinks himself obliged as well for the satisfaction of the public as his private profit, to prefix this advertisement, That he shall from week to week give account of all news or transaction which shall occur either at home or abroad, which being a means to prevent the disquiet of people’s spirits, continually agitated by phanatique lyes, he hopes that whoever receives any certain intelligence of affairs will be pleased freely to communicate the same. (13–20 January 1663) Dancer’s desire to combat ‘phanatique lyes’ that he believed were disquieting people’s spirits was reflected in a banner on the front page of his second issue. This declared the paper’s purpose as being ‘for information of the people, and prevention of false news’. Dancer’s distaste for certain fake news was evident from a report in the same issue about soldiers who stopped the celebration of a Catholic mass at Christmas. Dancer, a Protestant, wished to rebut a rumour: Whereas there hath lately been a very scandalous report spread abroad by some pretended Roman Catholicks, which hath been greedily swallowed as truth by the multitude; viz. That the souldier [sic] who was lately found dead in the [River] Liffee [sic] was one, who upon the breaking off their meeting at Christmas last did take the chalice and drink, saying he would put their God into his belly, and that night as a just Judgment of God did drown himself. This is to inform all people, that this person was so farr from doing such a thing; that he was neither of the party, nor company that seized upon them. And that this report is most notoriously false and scandalous. (20–27 January 1663) Yet Dancer himself helped to disseminate a report concerning a planned voyage from Munster in search of Hy-­Brazil, a phantom or mythical island in the west. The report included reference to visions and to what may have been a mass delusion involving people in Limerick. It was ostensibly news about a fake island rather than fake news about Ireland.

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While such reports presumably helped to sell his paper, Dancer’s main diet of news concerned the Court of Claims, which sat at the premises of King’s Inns, Ireland’s sole inn of court. From 1541 until the later eighteenth century King’s Inns occupied a former Dominican monastery on the north bank of the Liffey, opposite the old walled city of Dublin. The inns appear on Speed’s wonderful map of Dublin, drawn about 1610. From 14 January 1663 the new Court of Claims began to hear cases, sitting from eight o’clock in the morning. In his Ireland from the Restoration to the Revolution John Prendergast, who in the nineteenth century read the court’s records which were later destroyed, wrote of those dispossessed people who tried to get their lands back: Imagination then may easily paint the scene that Ireland presented at the opening of this second court of claims [at King’s Inns]. Round the doors of the newly opened court may be pictured an anxious crowd of impoverished noblemen, and tattered gentlemen of old descent, some of English blood, some of pure Irish, many of them soldiers of foreign air, ‘with patched buff coats, jack boots and Bilboa blade’, broken-­hearted widows and orphans. These were the Irish. Some of these officers had spent six years in misery in Connaught; some, ten years in sieges and battles under perpetual fire in France, Italy and Flanders. For, from the known bravery of their race, they were ever allowed the post of honour, while it happened also to be the post of danger: Others had dwelt in garrets and cellars at Paris or Bruges. (Prendergast 1887: 7) One finds in Dancer’s weekly reports from the Court of Claims that some claimants were adjudged ‘innocent’, and were thus eligible to recover lands, but others were adjudged ‘nocent’, a word no longer used today that signified the opposite of innocent. Thus, for example, in the third issue of Mercurius Hibernicus (27 January–3 February 1663), we read that on Wednesday 28 January 1663 ‘Dame Mary Dungans [sic] cause was heard in Court, and none being found to criminate her, she was adjudged innocent and to be restored to her Dowry.’ Next day ‘Alice Lutterell, alias St. Laurence was by the Court adjudged innocent, and to be restored to the Land left her by Her Husbands [sic] will.’ But that same day, ‘Christopher Hancocke the Father was declared nocent, and so the claim dismissed.’ The Court of Claims worked its way through hundreds of cases, all grist to the mill of Mercurius Hibernicus. But other news in the paper’s third issue included a report from Kinsale, Co. Cork, that the governor of Jamaica had arrived at that port. Mercurius Hibernicus also included some items of foreign news lifted directly from English and other publications as they arrived in Dublin. From Paris came a story in the fifth issue (10–17 February 1663) that

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was worthy of Shakespeare, or even of a tabloid today. This concerned ‘the assassination or murder of a very hopeful and noble Person, a natural son of the King of Denmark’. He was reported to have travelled to Paris, having ‘enticed away with him a young Gentlewoman, whom he after kept with him in the habit [uniform] of a Page, the imagination of the ignominy and stain thereby laid on . . .’ The woman’s brother pursued the young Dane to Paris and killed him. The dead man, it was said, had been intended by his father as spouse for the youngest daughter of the deceased Duke of Orleans, the king’s uncle. Sensational too (in the seventh number, 24 February–2 March 1663) was the tale of a London linen-­draper from whom a servant of the Russian ambassador in London allegedly stole items. When the draper went to the ambassador to complain discreetly, he was invited to stay for d ­ inner – ­only to find the head of the dishonest servant being served up on a dish with the second course. ‘This is by letters affirmed, the next Post will give us the certainty’, Mercurius Hibernicus informed its readers. Of course, there was crime in Dublin as well as in London and Paris. The sixth issue of Mercurius Hibernicus (17–24 February 1663) carried reports of horses stolen from the stables of one ‘Mr Phillips’ in Dame Street and of a duel at St Patrick’s Well that left Ensign Bromley dead. Advertisements too referred to horses ­stolen – ­from people in counties Down, Meath and Louth. Their addresses suggest a readership that stretched beyond Dublin, and it might have been relevant to Dancer’s decision to launch his paper that in its year of publication the posts to points distant from Dublin increased to twice weekly. Dancer also published in the sixth number a schedule of forthcoming assize sittings around Ireland with their assigned judges identified. But it was the business of the Court of Claims itself that predominated his court reporting. It is notable how many of the claimants in his reports bore the name of some old settler families of the Pale who had held out against the Protestant Reformation or whose loyalty to London was otherwise suspect. These once powerful families, as a class, would never fully recover from setbacks during the seventeenth century. Given the level of censorship or control of the emerging press during the seventeenth century in Britain and Ireland, it is unsurprising to find that, no matter how innovative it might be for its time, Mercurius Hibernicus neither questioned the recent restoration of Charles II after the Cromwellian interlude nor challenged directly the aspirations of that king’s representative in Dublin, the Duke of Ormond. Yet Dancer was an innovator, and he displayed some of the characteristics of more modern journalism when he pushed too far too fast. He did so by producing outside the pages of his paper an unauthorised account of a controversial speech in the Irish Parliament. Since its late beginnings in Ireland, printing had been tightly restricted or supervised by Dublin

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Castle. Mary Pollard notes (1980: 79) that there was ‘only one regular printer at work in Dublin from 1551 for the next 130 years’ (until the 1680s). Indeed, each week Mercurius Hibernicus carefully stated on its front page that it was ‘Published with Licence, according to Order’. Nevertheless, on 2 March 1663 members of the Irish House of Commons complained that ‘Samuel Dancer, bookseller, had presumed to print and publish the speech made by their Speaker, contrary to his order, and had expressed several words to the derogation of the honour and authority of Parliament’. It was ordered that the Serjeant at Arms arrest Dancer, and keep him in custody, ‘until the further order and pleasure of the House’. The speaker of the Commons was Audley Mervyn, whose speech Dancer published as a pamphlet, although he did first advertise it in Mercurius Hibernicus. It is not known if Dancer was in fact taken into custody or fined, but this reaction by Parliament is thought to have ensured in effect that no further such complaints were made during the seventeenth century. Like any frustrated editor today, Dancer also boldly let readers know that he had been rebuffed by the authorities in respect to another matter: ‘You can have no information concerning the Plot, or upon what score the persons now in Hold were secured, it being not thought fit by the Council as yet to divulge any thing concerning it.’ The plot to which he referred was presumably that alleged in late 1662, when it was claimed that a letter found in a mass-­book dropped in a bog by one James Dermott of Meath revealed that priests were coming from abroad and the people were compelled to support them. Dancer’s complaint in this instance may be one of the earliest examples of investigative journalism prompting authorities to take remedial action. One week after it appeared in his paper the lords justices and council ordered that all those who had been arrested and held in custody since the alleged priestly plot was discovered were to be released, except for persons charged with treason, felony or breach of the peace. However, Dancer’s paper did not survive for much longer, although we do not know if his decisions to publish the speaker’s address and to complain about the reluctance of authorities to provide information were directly connected with its demise. Hugh Oram has written in his History of Newspapers in Ireland, 1649– 1983 that ‘Dancer’s newspaper efforts did not set the Liffey alight and there was no great rush to emulate his example’ (1983: 23). It is the case that more than twenty years were to pass before the next Irish newspaper, the Dublin News-letter, hit the streets in 1685. But if Oram’s claim that Dancer had not set the River Liffey on fire is a criticism of his journalism, it should be acknowledged that Dancer had at least made an effort to be informative and entertaining. He had uniquely so far, and for a further two decades more, offered the public a distinctive and regular weekly paper. His Mercurius Hibernicus may

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justly be regarded as not only the home of the earliest Irish court reporting but also as the first Irish newspaper. It was, as described on the front page of the launch issue, ‘the first attempt of this nature in Ireland’.

Case Study 9: The Early Years of the Freeman’s Journal, 1763–1806 Felix M. Larkin The Freeman’s Journal, which would become the foremost Irish nationalist daily newspaper in Dublin in the nineteenth century, commenced its 161 years of continuous publication on 10 September 1763. Originally titled the Public Register or Freeman’s Journal, the secondary title superseded that of the Public Register in general usage very early on. Nevertheless, and although the masthead of the newspaper went through several iterations in the period 1763–1806, and the words ‘Public Register’ were less prominently displayed on its masthead from July 1797 onwards, the full original title was retained until the newspaper began daily publication on 28 April 1806. It was initially published twice a week only, on Tuesdays and Saturdays; and from October 1769 until April 1806 a third issue per week was published on Thursdays. With the advent of daily publication, the newspaper’s title became the Freeman’s Journal and Daily Commercial Advertiser, and that remained its full title until 1892. Each version of the masthead in the period 1763–1806 featured a representation of Hibernia carrying a laurel wreath in one hand and three serpents in the other. At first Hibernia was surrounded by a ­ border – ­ square until September 1770, circular ­thereafter – i­n which was written the motto ‘The wreath or the rod’. From July 1797 to April 1806, however, there was no border and no motto, though Hibernia was still depicted carrying the wreath and the serpents. The serpents may symbolise ignorance, corruption and tyranny, as suggested in the preamble to the prospectus for the new newspaper that was published in some early numbers: Whereas it is most evident that the present happy state of KNOWLEDGE and LITERATURE and the establishment of the TRUE RELIGION and CIVIL CONSTITUTION of these Kingdoms are owing to the PRINTING-­ ART; and whereas the extending, improving and preserving these invaluable Blessings apparently depend on the FREEDOM of the PRESS, against which IGNORANCE, CORRUPTION and TYRANNY have ever been found to combine in all States of the World and have, in almost all but ours, fatally prevailed to the Extinction of useful Knowledge and Learning, and of pure Religion and Liberty; therefore, as the first and great Means of

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The aforementioned motto on the newspaper’s masthead encapsulated its determination to uphold the freedom of the press; and, lest there be any confusion about the import of the motto, the Freeman’s first number carried in the body of the newspaper an elaboration as follows: ‘The wreath and the rod of the Free Press for ever’. Noting that ‘­Tyrants . . . ­in all ages have made it their principal study to interrupt, suppress and prevent all intelligence and correspondence between the people’, the newspaper also stated in its first number: For virtues, for the patriot, for the lover, for the benefactors of mankind, we bear the due wreath of approbation or renown. We bear the scourge alone for the immoral, the disloyal, the injurers of innocence; for the enemies of virtue, of liberty, and of our country. (Freeman’s Journal, 10 September 1763; Madden 1867, II: 381) The Freeman was broadly faithful to this manifesto until the early ­1780s – ­giving ‘nearly twenty years of honourable service to the cause of the country and of the party of patriotism, independence and reform’, to quote from an article published by the newspaper in 1913 to mark its third jubilee. In the early 1780s, however, it became a government o ­ rgan – a ­ gain quoting from that 1913 article: ‘like an honest ship boarded in the night by a buccaneer, it fell into the hands of the enemy’ – and not until 1810 did it revert to the paradigm of a free press (Wyse Power 1913: 20). The earliest numbers of the newspaper were small in size, with four pages of three columns each, consisting of text and advertisements/notices in the ratio 2 to 1 ­approximately – ­and the pages were only 16 inches in length by 10 in width (Madden 1867, II: 373). It still comprised four pages per number when it became a daily newspaper in 1806, but the pages were larger from February 1770 onwards and the contents were spread over ­four – ­rather than ­three – ­columns per page from August 1773. Its price when it was launched in 1763 was one penny, but this increased to 1½ pence in March 1774 when stamp duty on newspapers was introduced in Ireland under the Irish Stamp Act of that year; stamp duties had not applied in Ireland before then (O’Malley 2020: 199, n. 4). The initial amount of the duty on newspapers was a half-­penny. This increased to one penny in March 1785, and there was a pro rata increase in the price of the Freeman to two pence in that month. The price further increased to four pence in March 1798, when the duty was raised to two pence and other government levies also increased. Stamp duty on newspapers in Ireland was, however, lower than that imposed

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in Britain and increases in the duty lagged behind (Cox and Mowatt 2020: 36). The aim of the Irish ­Parliament – a ­ s it was that of the Westminster ­Parliament – ­in introducing and then increasing the duty on newspapers, and also the related duties on paper and advertisements, was to try to curb the spread of radical ideas via the press, and this was acknowledged in a comment made by the Freeman in response to the increase in stamp duty in 1785: In respect of the additional stamp duties, we shall observe, if they are meant to operate as a restraint on the too great liberty of the press, that we are involved in the punishment of and become sufferers for the guilt of others, since our aim has been to moderate and temper, not to inflame the public mind. But if the additional duties be intended, as we believe, merely to increase the revenue and their income to be appropriated to salutary national purposes, we shall not inconsiderately nor intemperately condemn a measure which, though a partial evil, may operate as a general good. (Freeman’s Journal, 24–26 March 1785) Thus did the Freeman’s Journal, indisputably a government organ by 1785, put a positive spin on what was a coercive measure inimical to the freedom of the press. To ‘inflame the public mind’ was precisely why the Freeman’s Journal had been established in 1763, and it w ­ as – ­until it ‘fell into the hands of the enemy’ in the ­1780s – ­the most influential newspaper in opposition to the government in Dublin. It was, indeed, the first significant Irish newspaper to publish original and independent political essays (Gilbert 1861, I: 294) – and the only one at that time that ‘achieved a reputation in controversy’ (Inglis 1954: 20). It was also one of the first to write about local matters, rather than simply copying news direct from English newspapers (Inglis 1954: 19–20). It would later claim to have been founded by Charles Lucas, Henry Flood and Henry ­Grattan – l­eaders of the so-­called ‘patriot’ opposition party in the Irish House of Commons, who agitated vigorously for parliamentary reform and for legislative independence for the Irish Parliament (achieved in 1782) – but this was not, strictly speaking, correct. Lucas and his nephew, John Lucas, are believed to have conceived the idea of starting the newspaper, and Charles Lucas certainly assisted in its establishment and wrote for it occasionally until his death in 1771 (Madden 1867, II: 390–2; Markham 1913: 22). The founding owners and managers were, however, an anonymous ‘Committee for the Free Press’, which comprised thirteen Dublin merchants and tradesmen who acted much like the board of directors of a company; three of t­hem – ­John Grant, William Braddell and Edward ­Tandy – ­appear to have had between them a controlling interest at the outset (Gilbert 1861, I: 292–4; Madden 1867, II:

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373–4, 391–2; Wyse Power 1913: 19). From 1764 until the newspaper was sold in 1779 to Isaac Colles, a Dublin bookseller, the committee had its own printing works in St Audeon’s Arch, in Dublin; before and after those dates the newspaper was printed by various commercial establishments in D ­ ublin – ­presumably on a contract basis (Freeman’s Journal, 16–18 February 1779; Gilbert 1861, I: 294). The first editor was a distinguished literary figure, Henry Brooke, and during his relatively brief period as editor (1763–64), he wrote a total of sixty-­five pieces under the pen-­name ‘The Watchman’ (Donlan 2009). Articles in the Freeman at this time were nearly always signed with pen-­names, in an effort to shelter the authors from prosecution for libel or sedition; and in March 1774, following the introduction of stamp duty on newspapers, the Freeman’s proprietors reassured their contributors that ‘no danger or temptation shall ever prevail on them to discover the author of any letter they publish or to give any intimation, hint or conjecture of his name or character, nor suffer his original paper to appear in evidence against him’ (Freeman’s Journal, 22–24 March 1774). The identification of the early Freeman with Flood and ­Grattan – ­as well as ­Lucas – ­arose because the columns of the newspaper were open to them, as to other lesser-­known ‘patriot’ MPs, to advance their political ideas and mobilise public opinion. The Freeman and certain other newspapers which, inspired by its example, pursued a reformist agenda put the government in Ireland, as James Kelly has pointed out, ‘on the back foot in the public sphere for most of the 1770s and 1780s’ (Kelly 2018: 62). Grattan wrote of the Freeman in this first phase of its history that it was a newspaper ‘that upheld liberal principles, that raised a public spirit where there had been none, and kept up a public feeling when it was sinking, and to which, in a great degree, Ireland was indebted for her liberties’ (Grattan 1839, I: 82). These ‘liberties’ would be extinguished by the Act of Union of 1800, but they did not, of course, extend to the majority Catholic population of Ireland; the ‘patriot’ party, and the Freeman’s Journal as its organ, represented an Irish Protestant separatist ­tradition – ­a form of ‘colonial nationalism’. The Freeman’s transition from an opposition organ to a government one was a gradual process, spread over the period 1782–84; and while winning over the Freeman was undoubtedly a boon to the authorities in Dublin, it seems that they did not engineer it (Inglis 1954: 34). Instead, the newspaper was freely steered into the government camp by one Francis H ­ iggins – ­apparently motivated by greed and ambition. He had been associated with the Freeman probably from as early as 1779, when Isaac Colles bought it; and he became its owner in 1783 when he suddenly called in a loan that he had advanced to Colles (Fitzpatrick 1866: 24). The Freeman under Higgins was the beneficiary of lucrative sums for publishing government ­proclamations

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– ­in effect, a government subsidy which, for example, amounted to £1,600 in 1788 (Bartlett 2004: 25). In 1800 the Freeman supported the Act of ­Union – ­illustrating just how far the newspaper had by then departed from the principles that had guided its fortunes in the years before Higgins’s proprietorship (Madden 1867, II: 450). Higgins, characterised by Christopher Woods as an ‘adventurer’ and a ‘plausible rogue’, was a man of humble origins, and he acquired the sobriquet ‘Sham Squire’ because he had been so described by the presiding judge at his trial in 1767 for assaulting his mother-­in-­law; he went to prison for that assault, and again for a later excise fraud (Bartlett 2004: 23–4; Woods 2009). As owner of the Freeman, he attained a position of prominence and respectability in Dublin society, practising as an attorney and holding a variety of prestigious ­posts – ­including deputy coroner of Dublin, under-­sheriff for County Dublin and a Justice of the Peace for County Dublin (Woods 2009). Despite this, his murky past haunted him always: in the words of W. J. Fitzpatrick, ‘through life he was the subject of popular execration, and in death this enemy pursued him’ (1866: 157). Accordingly, Arthur G ­ riffith – ­the leading Irish nationalist polemicist of the early twentieth century, journalist and later p ­ olitician – w ­ rote of him: ‘Higgins, who was originally a pot-­boy in a public house in Fishamble Street, Dublin, became successively a forger, a convict, a brothel-­keeper, a gambling house owner, a blackmailer, and editor and proprietor of the Freeman’s Journal’ (Nationality, 26 May 1917). By 1795 Higgins was also serving the government directly, but secretly, as an ‘informant’ – as distinct from an ‘informer’ (Bartlett 2004: 23). He was well placed as a newspaper proprietor to pick up information that might be useful to the authorities and, in addition, he ran a network of agents throughout Dublin who supplied him with information which was relayed by him to the authorities. The most important of these agents was Francis Magan, and he gave Higgins the information on the whereabouts of Lord Edward F­ itzGerald – ­the most charismatic of the leaders of the 1798 rebellion in ­Ireland – ­that facilitated FitzGerald’s capture. Higgins was awarded a secret service pension of £300 per annum plus a bounty of £1,000 for this information, and he was in receipt of numerous other government payments for information and other services (Bartlett 2004: 25–30; Woods 2009). Arthur Griffith would try to discredit the moderate nationalist editorial policy of the Freeman’s Journal in the early years of the twentieth century by invoking Higgins’s ­name – ­for example, as follows: ‘the evil spirit of Francis Higgins still haunts the office where the blood of Lord Edward FitzGerald was bought and sold, and guides the hand that writes the Freeman’s Journal leading articles’ (Sinn Féin, 31 October 1914). Higgins died on 19 January 1802, bequeathing the Freeman and most of the rest of his considerable estate to his ward, Frances ­Tracy – ­who was

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probably his illegitimate daughter (Wyse Power 1913: 20; Woods 2009). On her marriage in September 1802, the newspaper passed to her husband Philip Whitfield Harvey, the nephew of a former business associate of Higgins. Under Harvey’s ownership, the Freeman – published daily from 1806 ­onwards – ­continued to support the government until 1810, though ‘ineffectively, in obscurity’ (Inglis 1954: 116, 119–21). It then broke with the government decisively. Having thus regained its independent voice, it was well placed to become the important newspaper that it was by the mid-­nineteenth century (Larkin 2006: 44–8). The central position that the Freeman would have in ­Irish – a ­ nd, in particular, D ­ ublin – p ­ ublic life is reflected in the fact that it features prominently in Joyce’s Ulysses. Francis Higgins, the ‘Sham Squire’, gets two cryptic references in Ulysses; and the ‘Aeolus’ episode of the novel, set in the Freeman’s offices, records the historic association of Lucas, Flood and Grattan with the newspaper (Joyce [1922] 2008: 104, 114, 198; Larkin 2011: 16–17).

Chapter Eleven

THE SCOTTISH PRESS Rhona Brown

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rom its establishment in the 1640s through to 1800, the Scottish periodical press underwent a profoundly radical evolution. While James Watson’s Edinburgh Gazette – thought to have been Scotland’s first recognisably modern n ­ ewspaper – d ­ ates to around 1699 (Brown 2012: 353), the Scottish press was active in printing and distributing the news from the 1640s onwards. In the early 1700s Scottish newspapers depended largely on the London press for their content, but as the decades advanced, their perspectives turned simultaneously inwards and outwards: while English papers continued to provide source material, the attention of Scottish journalists and editors moved increasingly towards Scottish affairs, local politics and concerns, while coverage of global events also intensified. By the 1790s, in response to the French Revolution and its aftermath, political journalism had evolved still further, and radical reporting became more commonplace. Radical papers, such as the short-­lived but influential Edinburgh Gazetteer (1792–94), were often challenged and frequently shut down by the government via charges of seditious libel, but they nevertheless provided significant blueprints for news reporting which the newspaper press would follow in the ensuing centuries and into the twenty-­first century. As Scottish newspapers became more established, numerous and independent, and as readers demanded more diverse reading materials, the marketplace expanded in the early eighteenth century to accommodate the magazine, which could be issued on a weekly or monthly basis. While often incorporating the news, magazines were truly miscellaneous in nature, containing essays on countless topics including history, medicine, religion, politics, philosophy and literature, as well as letters to the editor, book reviews and a poetry section, 268

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giving a clear and valuable reflection of contemporary debates and issues of concern. These magazines constructed the foundations upon which the canonical periodical publications of the nineteenth century would build and flourish: the examples of the Scots Magazine and the Weekly Magazine, or Edinburgh Amusement provided models for Blackwood’s Magazine and the Edinburgh Review, thus helping ‘to fundamentally shape the nation’s literary and political public sphere in the long eighteenth century’ and beyond (Benchimol, Brown and Shuttleton 2015: 1). This chapter analyses the establishment of the Scottish periodical press in the mid-­seventeenth century and its development throughout the eighteenth century and, through a series of case studies, demonstrates the centrality of newspapers and magazines to daily life and debate in Scotland in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Newspapers According to pioneering historian of the Scottish periodical press W. J. Couper, the newsbook entitled Mercurius Caledonius, which ran from 31 December 1660 to 8 January 1661, ‘has long reigned as the first undoubted Scottish periodical’. Couper justifies this conclusion by emphasising the nationality of the paper’s editor, Thomas Sydserf or St Serfe (1624–69): ‘He was a Scotsman born and bred’ (Couper 1908, I: 59). There is no doubt that the Mercurius Caledonius was a significant publication in the early years of the Scottish periodical press. Its opening issue ‘begins with the arrival of the High Commissioner, John Middleton, in Scotland and the opening of the first Restoration parliament, with seemingly eyewitness detail of its proceedings’; as Jessica Reid has argued, St Serfe’s paper reported on the Restoration as a symbol of ‘the return of order following a protracted period of disorder’ (2020: 110). The Mercurius Caledonius also had an established structure which anticipates the modern newspaper, including introductory editorial comment, a section covering the debates of the Scottish Parliament and a segment of news gathered mainly from the London papers. Having said this, Couper’s categorisation of the Mercurius Caledonius as the first Scottish newspaper based on its editor’s nationality is potentially misleading. Before the launch of St Serfe’s paper in late 1660, the Scottish press had circulated at least eight news-­sheets and newspapers. The Diurnal Occurrances, Touching on the dailie proceedings in Parliament (1641–42), published by Edinburgh printer Robert Bryson who operated ‘At the signe of Jonah’ (SBTI 2016a) between 1639 and 1646, is generally regarded as the first of these

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news-­sheets. Although Couper acknowledges that Bryson’s paper was ‘the first known production of the Edinburgh newspaper press’ (1908, I: 164), it is rejected as Scottish because it was a reprint of a paper of the same name, printed in London by Iohn Hammond in 1641. An earlier publication, not noted by Couper, was Heads of Severall Proceedings in the Present Parliament. This news-­sheet was first published in 1641 but was, like the Diurnal Occurrances, an Edinburgh reprint of a London paper. Bryson followed the Diurnal Occurrances with A Continuation of the True Diurnall Occurrences in Parliament from January 1642. Although there is no evidence to suggest that it was a reprint, this paper is not regarded by Couper as a production of the Scottish periodical press because it was dedicated exclusively to reporting on the proceedings of the English Parliament. Bryson’s newspapers were supplemented in the summer of 1651 by Mercurius Scoticus, or a true character of Affairs in England, Scotland, Ireland and other Forraign Parts. This paper, regarded by eighteenth-­ century historian of Edinburgh Hugo Arnot as being the ‘first news-­paper that we believe was ever printed in Scotland’ (1788: 454), was produced in Leith before being suppressed by an edict from the English Commissioners forbidding ‘the printing of diurnalls at Leith or elsewhere’ (Couper 1908, I: 166). The Mercurius Scoticus was followed in 1652 by A Diurnall of Some Passages and Affairs, also a Leith reprint of a London journal, and the Mercurius Politicus, which originated in London and was printed in Leith from October 1653 (Couper 1908, I: 171). The Mercurius Politicus was made up of sixteen pages rather than one sheet; in Arnot’s account, from 1655 ‘it was reprinted at Edinburgh, which appears to have been the first time that a news-­paper was put to the press in that city’ (1788: 454). This was an enduring paper for the period, surviving beyond 1660, by which time it was retitled Mercurius Publicus. These papers were succeeded by two new imprints by prominent Leith and Edinburgh publisher Christopher Higgins, who succeeded Evan Tyler as government printer. The first, printed from 1659 in Edinburgh, was the Faithfull Intelligencer from the Parliaments Army in Scotland, which set itself in opposition to the Mercurius Politicus, dismissing its rival as ‘a pure Scotch title, more sound than substance. It hath likewise a Highland pedigree, – hardly a line true’ (Couper 1908, I: 175). In contrast to its predecessors, the Faithfull Intelligencer is regarded as being the first newspaper to have been fully prepared, edited and produced in Edinburgh. Higgins continued the Faithfull Intelligencer with a new title: the Mercurius Britanicus, or a Collection

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of such real and faithful Intelligence as can be gathered from England and Scotland concerning the present Transactions in them both, which also dates to 1659. Despite the fact that Higgins’s papers were the first to be entirely edited and published in Scotland’s capital, they appear to be rejected by Couper as foundational Scottish periodicals because their editor and publisher was not a Scotsman: according to contemporary account, former government printer Tyler ‘made over part of his forfeited gift to some Stationers in London, who sent down upon us Christopher Higgins and some English servants with him’ (SBTI 2016b). Although acknowledging that Robert Bryson might be regarded as the ‘father of Scottish journalism’ (Couper 1908, I: 165) with his foundational news publications, Couper notes that ‘the honour would have been much greater had his production been original to the north country’: for Couper, Bryson’s paper ‘was at best only a transplanted alien’ (1908, I: 56). While the Mercurius Scoticus ‘comes nearer to a true native production’, it is nevertheless excluded by Couper on the grounds of its having been ‘produced by Englishmen for Englishmen, and in that respect [it] fails in being purely Scottish’ (1908, I: 57). Although Couper’s pioneering survey work on the early Scottish periodical press remains indispensable, his categorisation of early newspapers according to the perceived Scottishness of their contents and staff downplays the early activity of the Scottish press between 1640 and 1660. It is certainly the case that early imprints by Bryson and others tended to be reprints of London journals, and it is also true that St Serfe’s Mercurius Caledonius was the first known newspaper to be produced in Scotland and conducted in full by a Scotsman. However, it is myopic to diminish the significance of the early Scottish newspapers the Faithfull Intelligencer and Mercurius Britanicus simply because their editor was an Englishman. St Serfe is rightly regarded as a foundational publisher in the Scottish periodical press, but the pioneering efforts of Bryson and Higgins should also be recognised as providing the models on which more substantial and enduring news publications would build. Numerous diurnals and occurrences were published in Scotland throughout the late seventeenth century, but it was not until 1699 that the Scottish newspaper, as it would be recognised today, was born. The Edinburgh Gazette was printed by influential Edinburgh publisher James Watson (c. 1664–1722), who went on to be one of Her (His) Majesty’s Printers from 1713 to 1719, and His Majesty’s Printer Edinburgh from 1720 to 1722 (SBTI 2016c), with partners John Reid Senior and James Donaldson. Watson was a gatekeeper of both

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Scottish printing practices and Scottish literary culture, publishing A Specimen of Types in James Watson’s Printing-House in 1706 and A Choice Collection of Comic and Serious Scots Poems both Ancient and Modern (1706, 1709, 1711). He also ‘recognised the value of the new journalism, and after initiating the Gazette he published at least eight other periodicals through to 1711’ (Brown 2012: 353). The Edinburgh Gazette was foundational in terms of its structure and content and, although more than half of the paper was ‘occupied with intelligence from outside Scotland’ (Couper 1908, II: 204), it provided information on the excise, advertisements and, significantly, a portion of local news. It was sold by subscription and as its masthead announces, at ‘John Vallange’s shop’, as well as being made available to readers outside Edinburgh. The Edinburgh Gazette held the monopoly in printing the news in the city for five years, with Donaldson holding an authority which ‘expressly forbade, under penalty, anyone “penning or publishing the like”’ (Couper 1908, II: 215). This domination came to an end in 1705, when Adam Boig was successful in petitioning the Privy Council to publish his Edinburgh Courant, by which time ‘Donaldson seems to have lost the support of his vendors’ (Fox 2020: 200). To distinguish itself from the Edinburgh Gazette, the Edinburgh Courant placed special emphasis on shipping intelligence, thus providing a news service that had been previously unavailable. Boig’s short-­lived Edinburgh Courant was joined in 1707 by Andrew Symson’s Edinburgh Flying Post and Donaldson’s reconstituted Edinburgh Gazette, as well as numerous, similarly fleeting papers. Edinburgh would wait around ten years for two newspapers that would stand the test of time: the Edinburgh Evening Courant, founded in 1718 and published by James McEuen, William Brown and John Mosman, and the Caledonian Mercury, first printed in 1720 by William Adams Junior and after 1724 by Thomas Ruddiman (1674– 1757). In an editorial statement in its opening issue, the Edinburgh Evening Courant set itself apart from previous and contemporary newspapers: ‘Hitherto our newspapers have been very partial, tame, and defective, or otherwise stuffed with uncertain, ill-­digested, false, or frivolous accounts’ (Edinburgh Evening Courant, 15 December 1718). Despite its promise of impartiality, it soon became known for anti-­Jacobite sentiment in the context of the Jacobite risings of the first half of the eighteenth century. Although ‘a “rebel press” was briefly set up at Perth during the Jacobite rebellion of 1715’ (Fox 2020: 12), newspaper coverage of subsequent risings came from Edinburgh. According to Robert Chambers, from 1745 the Courant ‘continued

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throughout all the subsequent campaign to express such violent hostility to the insurgents, that the editor was burned in effigy in Rome on the 10th of June 1746, amongst the other festivities’ to commemorate the birthday of the ‘Old Pretender’, James Francis Edward Stuart (1688–1766) (Chambers 1869: 97). The Courant printed a poem addressed to Charles Edward Stuart (1720–88) dismissing him as a ‘Presumptuous Youth’ and, when the Jacobite army reached Perth, the Courant depicted them as ‘a pitiful, ignorant crew, good for nothing, and incapable of giving any reason for their proceeding, but talking only of Snishing [taking snuff ], King Jamesh, ta Rashant [the Regent], plunder and new progues’ (Couper 1908, II: 26). Opinion-­ driven coverage of Jacobite activity such as the Courant’s provided the foundations for political news reporting in Scotland, thus paving the way for newspapers to adopt a particular political stance while proclaiming neutrality. The Edinburgh Evening Courant’s major competitor was launched in 1720. In its first issue, the Caledonian Mercury professed itself to be ‘a short account of the most considerable News Foraign and Domestick, and of the latest Books and Pamphlets imported from Abroad and Printed here’ (Caledonian Mercury, 28 April 1720). After Ruddiman became its editor in 1724, and as Jacobite activity increased in the 1740s, the Caledonian Mercury placed itself in sharp opposition to the Courant in matters political: as Chambers states, the Mercury ‘was so enthusiastic a Jacobite, that it was afterwards very much discountenanced and even persecuted by government’ (Chambers 1869: 97). In contrast to the Courant’s coverage, the Mercury was positive in its depiction of the Jacobite forces, stating in an issue published shortly after the Jacobite capture of Edinburgh that ‘Affairs in this City and Neighbourhood have taken the most surprizing Turn since Yesterday, without the least Bloodshed or Opposition; so that we now have in our Streets Highlanders and Bag pipes, in place of Dragoons and Drums’; indeed, ‘All these Highlanders behaved most civilly and discreetly, paying chearfully for what they had got, and continue to do so’ (Caledonian Mercury, 18 September 1745). In the issue for 2 September 1745, the Mercury printed a piece on James Murray, second Duke of Atholl (1690–1764), who had fled south following the events of 1745 and whose brother William had been attainted after his involvement in the 1715 rising: ‘His grace arrived here yesternight, having received a letter from his elder brother advising that he was coming to take up his quarters at the Castle of Blair’. Reading the implication, Murray lodged a complaint against Ruddiman, and the editor was ‘tried, convicted, fined £5 and 48 hours’ imprisonment, or until payment was

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made, and in addition had to publish an apology for the paragraph as “false, scandalous, and injurious”’ (Couper 1908, II: 45). This sentence was not, however, fatal to the Mercury. While the Courant had a pro-­ Union readership, the Mercury catered for an audience on the opposing side. Indeed, ‘both papers survived well into the next century and encountered only modest competition before Donaldson launched the Edinburgh Advertiser in 1764’ (Brown 2012: 355). The newspaper industry was almost entirely run from Edinburgh for the first half of the eighteenth century. In 1748 the capital’s papers were joined by James Chalmers’s Aberdeen Journal and in 1752 by the Aberdeen Intelligencer, run by Francis Douglas and William Murray. To establish a readership in the Highlands and beyond, Chalmers dealt with his subscribers by mail, ‘emphasising regional news and providing in depth coverage of the national press’ (Brown 2012: 356). The Dundee Weekly Intelligencer was launched in 1755. Newspapers continued to multiply in the Scottish capital throughout the 1760s and 1770s, but it was not until the 1780s that a newspaper press was established securely in Glasgow. John Mennons (1747–1818) had begun as a publisher in Edinburgh and, following his relocation west, established the Glasgow Advertiser in 1783, a paper that continues to this day as the Herald. Mennons was the first to recognise the particularities of regional newspaper readership by placing heavy emphasis on local industry and concerns: thanks to the city’s trade in tobacco, ‘half of Glasgow’s newspaper advertisements might be shipping news’ (Brown 2012: 356). Just as the Jacobite risings of the early eighteenth century split the news press into political camps, so too did the French Revolution and, in the 1790s, the Scottish radical newspaper was born. Chief among these publications was the Edinburgh Gazetteer, founded by William Johnston in November 1792, which took an overtly radical and pro-­ revolutionary posture. In its opening issue, Johnston stated that the paper’s key aim was to ‘arrest bad men in their career’ and to ‘acquire the power of searching out and expressing to the world, the detestable and crooked schemes by which corruption undermines the bulwarks of freedom’ (Edinburgh Gazetteer, 16 November 1792). To achieve this, the Gazetteer featured detailed reports of events in France, including the trial and execution of Louis XVI, as well as thorough accounts of the Scottish sedition trials, especially those of William Skirving, Thomas Muir, Thomas Fyshe Palmer and Maurice Margarot, and minutes of Reform Society meetings, including those of the Society of the Friends of the People. It was, according to Bob Harris, ‘the main Scottish radical newspaper’ (2005b: 199) of its time.

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If the newspapers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries were watched closely by the authorities for signs of disloyalty, governmental monitoring of the press reached new heights in 1790s Scotland. In this context, as Harris states, radical papers such as the Gazetteer ‘engaged in significant self-­censorship to deflect potential legal repression’ (2005a: 52). Nonetheless, following the Gazetteer’s publication of a report on the sedition trial of three Edinburgh printers in the issue dated 15 January 1793, Johnston was imprisoned for contempt of court. He was replaced by a new proprietor, Alexander Scott, who maintained the paper’s radical principles. After printing the proceedings of a British Convention of the Friends of the People in three separate issues of the Gazetteer – 26 November, 3 December and 10 December ­1793 – ­Scott was indicted for publicising what the government regarded as a ‘seditious association’. The editor ‘did not await the verdict of the jury, but fled, and was duly outlawed’ (Couper 1908, II: 198). No further issues of the Gazetteer beyond 29 January 1794 have been traced. The story of the first 150 years of the Scottish newspaper press is largely set in Edinburgh. Although Scottish newspapers began by reprinting news from the London press, they evolved to become more heavily invested in local news and concerns while reporting on major international events. From the Jacobite risings at mid-­century, Scottish newspapers began to take clearly defined political stances, prefiguring the methods and approaches of twentieth- and twenty-­first-­century journalism. Although the suppression of journalistic freedom is most apparent in the 1790s ‘amid the fervid atmosphere created by the French Revolution’ (Fox 2020: 429), the Scottish news press was observed closely by the government from its beginnings, with any hint of political disloyalty punished severely; indeed, these official pressures were, according to Harris, ‘underpinned by a battery of unofficial ones, including intimidation of readers and advertisers’ (2005a: 53). Nevertheless, the news-­sheets of the 1640s set the foundations for the early eighteenth-­century newspaper, which has continued in a format largely unchanged until this day.

Magazines If St Serfe’s Mercurius Caledonius has traditionally been regarded as Scotland’s first newspaper based on its editor’s nationality, the Scots Magazine, established in 1739, has long been recognised as Scotland’s first magazine, and for similar reasons. In fact, just as the early Scottish newspaper press was dominated by reprints of London papers, so too

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was the early Scottish magazine press. From the opening decades of the 1700s, Scotland was awash with short-­lived literary magazines which were mostly ‘Tatler–Spectator derivatives’ (Brown 2012: 364). The earliest of these were the Tatler and the Examiner, reprinted from the London originals by Edinburgh Gazette publisher James Watson from early 1710 onwards. Watson’s reprints were later joined by McEuen’s Echo, or Edinburgh Weekly Journal, first printed in 1728, Conjurer (1739) and the Reveur (1737). As with the nascent Scottish newspaper press, the activity of the early eighteenth-­century Scottish magazine press has been underestimated thanks to perceptions of ‘derivativeness’. The first Scottish magazines were indeed reprints, but these publications nevertheless demonstrate growing demand for a more substantial periodical offering rich and diverse reading material that included but also supplemented the information supplied by newspapers. The Scots Magazine, founded in 1739 by William Sands, Andrew Brymer, Andrew Murray and James Cochran, proclaimed its interest in local affairs and concerns from its opening issue. Setting itself as a Scottish alternative to the popular London-­based Gentleman’s Magazine, the Scots Magazine’s preface of January 1739 acknowledged the ‘general increase of readers for some years past’ before asserting its core emphasis: ‘the interest of Scotland, abstractedly consider’d’, which is ‘worthy of our most watchful attention’ (Scots Magazine, January 1739, i). The preface continued by bemoaning the time it took for news and magazines to reach Edinburgh from London, thus justifying the need for a locally produced periodical. It stated that the Scots Magazine strove for ‘a more impartial view of political disputes than had appeared in any other’, but also placed the Scots language at its core: aiming to remove ‘the just and grievous charge of castration and mutilation’, the magazine admitted ‘every Gentleman to speak his own language’ (January 1739, ii). Accordingly, the Scots Magazine would spotlight native poetic talent, ensuring that ‘the Caledonian Muse might not be restrain’d by want of a publick Echo to her song’ (January 1739, ii). The Scots Magazine’s ‘patriotic purpose’ (Couper 1908, II: 72) was therefore central to its outlook: its stated project was to provide swift and impartial news in a locally manufactured periodical while showcasing the Scots language and Scottish literature. The Scots Magazine set the template for subsequent eighteenth-­ century Scottish magazines. It covered political debates and proceedings alongside reports on national and domestic events, while providing lists of local births, deaths, marriages and preferments. Despite its professed impartiality, it was an anti-­Jacobite paper: although the

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Scots Magazine was careful to present accounts from both sides of the Jacobite debate alongside accurate reports of Jacobite activity and progress, it was openly opposed to the risings. In an issue published shortly after the catastrophic Jacobite loss at the battle of Culloden, the editors admitted a poem entitled ‘On the Victory at Culloden’, which celebrated the ‘vengeance’ dealt out to the Jacobite ‘rebel-­crew’ and described the victor, Prince William, Duke of Cumberland (1721–65), as O much accomplish’d youth! Britannia’s pride! Whom heavenly wisdom prompts, and angels guide; What thanks, what loud acknowledgements are due, From this whole land, to providence and you! (Scots Magazine, July 1746, 332) The Scots Magazine would enjoy unchallenged dominance in its field for almost twenty years and, apart from two periods during which it was withdrawn in the early nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it continues to this day. The Scots Magazine’s story is comparable with that of the early Scottish newspaper, the Edinburgh Evening Courant. Both periodicals had a period of monopoly and took a strongly pro-­government and anti-­Jacobite stance. In each of these aspects, their first and greatest challenges came from the Ruddiman publishing house. As Thomas Ruddiman’s Caledonian Mercury provided a pro-­Jacobite, Tory alternative to the Whiggish Edinburgh Evening Courant, so too did his nephew Walter Ruddiman’s (1719–81) Edinburgh Magazine (1757–62) offer a political alternative to the anti-­Jacobite Scots Magazine. Indeed, Walter Ruddiman had astonishing success as an editor and printer of periodicals. A significant Ruddiman production was the Weekly Magazine, or Edinburgh Amusement (1768–84): this was the first Scottish magazine to be produced on a weekly basis, giving it the advantage of being cheaper than its rival monthlies. Thanks to Ruddiman’s innovative approach to advertising and strong focus on local news, it enjoyed ‘unprecedented’ success and was able to exceed the Scots Magazine in terms of profit, selling 3,000 copies per week in 1776 (Arnot 1788: 453). The Weekly Magazine was also unusual in that it printed a large amount of news, giving it the advantage of immediacy but also allowing Ruddiman to avoid the stamp duty paid by newspapers. He was eventually challenged in this by ‘disgruntled competitors (probably [Peter] Williamson)’, who ‘complained loudly enough to the Excise Office, and Ruddiman was charged with failure to pay the duty. He lost the case’ (Brown 2012: 367).

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Beyond its pioneering approach to a­ dvertising – R ­ uddiman filled its blue covers with advertisements, thus maximising income and driving ­sales – ­and its enhanced emphasis on Scottish affairs, the Weekly Magazine was also influential on the development of Scottish literary culture. If the Scots Magazine emphasised contributors’ native language and provided a platform for the ‘Caledonian Muse’, Ruddiman championed poetry in the Scots language by extending patronage to Edinburgh poet Robert Fergusson (1750–74) in the 1770s. As author of Scots-­language poems including ‘The Daft Days’, Auld Reikie and ‘The Ghaists’, Fergusson was a central influence on Robert Burns (1759– 96). Fergusson’s professed anti-­Union, pro-­Jacobite stance allowed Ruddiman to defend and champion Scots-­language poetry via Tory historiography. In contrast to Ruddiman’s efforts, the short-­lived but significant Edinburgh Review (1755–56), published by Gavin Hamilton and John Balfour, rejected the Scots language in favour of what it termed ‘the progressive state of learning in this country’ (Edinburgh Review, July 1755, 1), while depicting Scotland as North Britain ‘in a state of early youth, guided and supported by the more mature strength of her kindred country’ (Edinburgh Review, July 1755, 2). Despite its short ­life – ­only two issues of the Edinburgh Review were ­published – ­and the ‘considerable disfavour’ (Couper 1908, II: 32) it incurred through its blunt and uncompromising reviews, it was influential: the Edinburgh Review printed the early work of William Robertson (1721–93) and Adam Smith (1723–90), paving the way for the enduring Edinburgh Review (1802–1929), first edited by Francis Jeffrey (1773–1850) and printed by Archibald Constable (1774–1827). According to Ralph McLean, the first Edinburgh Review also gave ‘an opportunity for the ascendant Moderate Party in the Church of Scotland to insinuate their cultural, linguistic and religious beliefs into the Scottish public sphere’ (2015: 33). As with the newspaper press, most Scottish magazines were concentrated in Edinburgh, but other Scottish towns were producing journals throughout the century. There were attempts to establish a magazine in Dundee in the 1750s and the 1770s. The Drumfries [sic] Mercury appeared in 1721, but it was not until 1773 that Robert Jackson’s Dumfries Weekly Magazine (1773–77), relaunched as the Dumfries Weekly Journal (1777–1835), gave southern Scotland an enduring literary periodical. The Perth Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure circulated in 1772, and in Glasgow, John Mennons was responsible for the Glasgow Magazine and Review, which ran from 1783 to 1784 (Craig 1931: 52–72).

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The periodical magazine did not escape governmental monitoring in the 1790s. Although no late eighteenth-­ century Scottish magazine matched the radical rhetoric of the Edinburgh Gazetteer, James Anderson (1739–1808) printed letters from the Friends of the People in the Bee (1790–94), as well as extracts from the letters of ‘Timothy Thunderproof ’, the pseudonym of radical James Thomson Callender (1758–1803), which were later published as The Political Progress of Britain (1794). Although Anderson printed ‘his own lengthy review of Callender’s pamphlet, distancing himself from any Painite faith in the lower orders’, he was, according to Jon Mee, ‘too late. Dundas moved against the Thunderproof letters, rounding up those involved in the printing of the Bee in the days after the Edinburgh Convention’ (2015: 73). A few more issues of the Bee appeared following Dundas’s action, but political pressure closed its doors after the final issue of 21 January 1794. Although they are often seen as distinct productions of the periodical press, Scottish newspapers and magazines followed a similar trajectory in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Early periodical productions were heavily reliant on London models, with the earliest Scottish newspapers and magazines being reprints of English titles. While these productions were not original, they nevertheless demonstrate a growing and diversifying Scottish readership with an increasing appetite for periodicals. From their Anglocentric foundations, Scottish newspapers and magazines gradually turned their attention towards local events and concerns, and the most successful productions of the eighteenth-­century Scottish periodical press were those that focused on Scottish news and enabled the facilitation of local economies. Polarised responses to the Jacobite risings of the first half of the eighteenth century gave birth to political reporting in Scotland, a trend that was intensified in the journalism published in the wake of the French Revolution. The Scottish periodical press was monitored closely, with ‘disloyal’ reporting suppressed and its publishers prosecuted from the 1640s through to the 1790s and beyond. Despite this, the newspapers and magazines produced in this 150-­year period, when read in conversation with one another, are a valuable representation of the contemporary Scottish public sphere, and an indispensable lens through which to identify the period’s urgent issues. In this, they set the foundations for the enduring newspapers and magazines of the nineteenth century and formed the basis of Scottish journalism as it exists in the twenty-­first century.

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Case Study 10: Reading the News in Scotland: The Jacobite Rising of 1715 Anette Hagan In 1715 supporters of the House of Stuart attempted to gain the throne of Scotland, England and Ireland for the Catholic James Francis Edward Stuart, the ‘Old Pretender’, by mounting a military campaign against the government and the Protestant Hanoverian King George I. The Earl of Mar’s raising of the standard of James Stuart in September 1715, declaring him King James VIII, heralded the beginning of the rising. The campaign’s main events included the battles of Sheriffmuir (13 November 1715) and Preston (14 November 1715), the Old Pretender’s arrival in Scotland (22 December 1715) and his return to France (2 February 1716). This case study concentrates on the battles of Sheriffmuir and Preston and their aftermaths. How did news about these campaigns reach people in Scotland? News in this context is defined as that which somebody reads or hears for the first time. Many of the protagonists were Gaelic-­speaking; however, until the 1740s only religious texts were published in Gaelic. The 1715 Rising thus unfolded as news in English with newspapers and broadsides as its primary vehicles aimed at a readership in Lowland Scotland. Due to the demise of the Edinburgh Gazette in March 1715, only two newspapers appeared in Scotland during the months in question. Both carried international, London and Scottish news and reported predominantly on military affairs. Some news items were mirrored in broadsides, but single-­sheet printing was particularly popular for conveying propaganda, satire, official proclamations, ballads, last speeches and ­exhortations – ­publications that carried news more indirectly. The west of Scotland was served by the Glasgow Courant newspaper, which changed its name to West Country Intelligence after three issues. Printed three days a week, it was aimed at ‘any Gentleman Ministrr or any other’ (Glasgow Courant, 11–14 November 1715, 12) and could be bought at the university printing house and at the post office for 1½ pence. It printed pieces of information that the proprietors had received by way of military ‘advices’, expresses and letters, invariably reflecting the government’s position. Regarding the preparations for the engagement at Sheriffmuir, the Glasgow Courant was swift to report that ‘Yesterday we received advice from Stirling that on the 12 Instant at 9 at Night they had an Express f­rom . . . ­the Duke of Argyle’ with news regarding Jacobite troop movements (11–14 November 1715, 9). Under the date of 14 November it reported, ‘We heard early this Morning that our Army was engaged with the Enemy on Dunblain Moor, that the Battle began yesterday at Twelve a Clock, and continued until it grew

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dark . . .’ (11–14 November 1715, 10). There followed the copy of a letter to the Provost of Glasgow dated ‘Stirling-­Bridge, Nov. 13 at 9 at Night’, which announced that the government forces under the Duke of Argyll were ‘master of the field’ (11–14 November 1715, 11). The next issue reported the content of an advice from Stirling dated 13 November, ‘Argyle obtain’d an Intire Victory over the Rebels in Sheriff Moor’ (15–17 November 1715, 8), followed by a list of Jacobite prisoners brought to Stirling. News received from Edinburgh provided details of the strength of cavalry and infantry forces on both sides along with their positions and movements during the battle. The same issue also carried hot-­off-­the-­press news regarding the battle of Preston with the promise of more information to follow: ‘Just now there came an Express from D ­ umfrice . . . ­that the Rebels in the South are wholly cut off at Preston in Lancashire, you shall have the Particulars in our next’ (15–17 November 1715, 11). Number 3 (17–19 November) accordingly reported in detail on the engagement at Preston; relevant information had been obtained from two expresses from Dumfries and several ‘advices’ from diverse other places. ‘Two Letters to a Gentleman in Glasgow’ from 16 and 17 November, which arrived in an express from Dumfries on 18 November, were printed in full along with the news that the Jacobite forces had surrendered. The first letter offers an insight into some distribution networks. ‘Sir, I thought Necessar to detain your Express, until the Carlile Post came in, that so we might have the further Particulars of the Action at Preston’ (17–19 November 1715, 10). The main source of information about the two battles that the Glasgow Courant drew on were military dispatches. However, news items from private individuals were also actively sought. The colophon of each number specified that The Gentlemen of the Towns of Aberdeen, St An [St Andrews], Invern, Brichen, Dundee, St Johnstoun, Stirling, Dumbarton, Inveraray, Dumfries, Lanerk, Hamiltoun, Renfrew, Paslay, Port-­Glasgow, Greenock, Irwin, Air, Kilmarnock and Stranraer are desired to send by Post any News they have. This list excludes not only any towns in the Highlands and Perthshire, that is, the Jacobite heartlands, but also the Borders and indeed Edinburgh. The capital was served by the Scots Courant, which also appeared three times a week and was sold for three pence at the Exchange Coffee House, clearly to a similar genteel clientele as its Glasgow counterpart. Occasionally, the Scots Courant was slower to report news than the Glasgow Courant. For example, the Scots Courant of 11–16 November 1715 published intelligence received from Newcastle about Jacobite troop movements of 4 November nearly two weeks after the event. More up-­to-­date was a detailed report about the battle of Sheriffmuir in the shape of a ‘Copy of the Printed Account’ in the same

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issue. This account also appeared as a broadside printed by the heirs and successors of Andrew Anderson in Edinburgh under the title Account of the Engagement near Dunblain Yesterday the 13th Instant, betwixt the King’s Army under the Command of his Grace the Duke of Argyll, and the Rebels commanded by Mar. Another broadside issued by the same printer, entitled A further Account of the Engagement near Dunblain and dated 16 November, followed suit. Both accounts reported some of the casualties and the names of Jacobite noblemen taken prisoner. This Further Account also appeared in the ensuing number of the Scots Courant (16–18 November 1715), along with other updates: the Earl of Forfar, who had been missing and was feared to be dead according to the broadside, was in fact ‘dangerously ill of his wounds at Stirling’ (Scots Courant, 16–18 November 1715, 9). It also printed a copy of three letters describing the aftermath of the battle of Preston. These letters, too, appeared as a broadside entitled A copy of three Letters, giving an Account of the total Defeat of the Rebels at Prestoun in Lancashire. It is dated at the top ‘Edinburgh November 16, 1715’ but has no imprint. Two of these letters were written at Carlisle, with the first being addressed to the Lord Provost of Dumfries, the second containing a request to forward it to Edinburgh and the third being directed to the Lord Provost of Edinburgh. He obviously ensured that this collected intelligence was printed as soon as possible. The Scots Courant also (re-)printed texts that appeared in formats other than broadsides. Number 1564 (16–18 November 1715) published a declaration by the Archbishop of Canterbury expressing his abhorrence at the rising; this declaration first appeared in London and was reprinted as an eight-­page pamphlet in Edinburgh for John Colston. Number 1565 (18–21 November) had more details of the battle of Sheriffmuir in the shape of ‘a Letter from a Gentleman at Stirling, to his Friend at Edinburgh’ dated 15 November. This included a list of the casualties as well as a ‘particular List of the Names of the Gentlemen Prisoners’ at Stirling Castle (16–18 November 1715, 8–10). The same letter with both lists was also published double-­sided on two folio sheets dated 17 November at the top, but without imprint. The Scots Courant for 25–28 November gave a detailed report of the battle of Preston nearly a fortnight after the event; the intelligence had been received from Wigan with the date 18 November. The issue for 30 November–2 December announced that on 15 November Parliament had ordered a Bill of Attainder against the ‘Old Pretender’ with a reward of £100,000 for his capture. James Watson, the printer of the Scots Courant, also produced this piece of legislation as a broadside with the title Clause of the Act for Further Security of His Majesty’s Person and Government. The next issue of the Scots Courant (2–5 December 1715) published a list of the Scots and English noblemen, gentlemen, their servants and private men taken prisoner at Preston, complete with total numbers. Precisely the same list

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was printed in Edinburgh by John Moncur as an oblong broadside with six columns. In this case, the single-­sheet publication preceded the printing in the Scots Courant: the latter observed at the end of the list that according to the London Gazette the total figure was in fact twenty fewer. While the above observations indicate a considerable duplication of identical news items in different formats, other pieces of intelligence were published as broadsides only. Margaret Reid in Edinburgh, for instance, printed A List of Scot’s Noblemen and Gentlemen Prisoners, that are designed for England. This undated broadside lists their names under the places of their confinement: the Castle, the Tolbooth, the Canongate Tolbooth and ‘the Earl of Wintons Lodging’. Another undated broadside attributed to either Margaret or John Reid presents A whole and Compleat List of what Men are Raised in Scotland, by the Noblemen, Gentlemen and Clans, &c. Neither list appeared in the Scottish newspapers. The sources for these pieces of intelligence cannot be traced. Whereas both newspapers, the Glasgow Courant and the Scots Courant, published news about the 1715 Jacobite Rising from the government perspective, broadsides were also issued from a press owned and operated by the Jacobite-­leaning printer Robert Freebairn. In 1715 he moved his press from Edinburgh to Perth, where the Jacobite forces were camped, in order to support their cause. He printed, among other texts, declarations by James Stuart presenting himself as King James VIII, as well as proclamations and an order by the military leader of the Jacobites, the Earl of Mar. Freebairn also printed An account of the engagement on the Sheriff-Muir, near Dumblain, the 13. Nov. 1715. Betwixt the Kings Army commanded by the Earl of Mar; and the Duke of Brunswick’s, commanded by Argyle on a double-­page folio sheet. The king referred to here is James Stuart: this report was intended to counter the  government-­ sponsored publications claiming victory for the Hanoverians. The battle was in fact undecided. Broadsides also played an important part in conveying news about the rising under the heading ‘Express’. Originating as handwritten military dispatches, expresses were conveyed to printers and typeset as soon as they arrived. This is evident, for instance, from the title of a single-­sheet item printed by John Moncur, By an Express come in this Morning from Stirling, we have the following news. This broadside contains the names of Jacobite prisoners taken at Dunfermline on 24 October 1715. A similar express giving a list of prisoners taken at the battle of Preston has ‘Whitehall November 18’ at the top, with the imprint stating that it was reprinted in Edinburgh by John Reid. Clearly, military intelligence from London also made it to Scottish presses. Newspapers thus informed the gentlemen who could afford them about the 1715 Rising with regard to military affairs, covering several events in a single number, often up-­to-­date and always from the official government point

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of view. Broadsides focused on single events or presented lists, manifestos, proclamations or expresses. Both the government and the Jacobites used them to their advantage. They were cheaper than newspapers and reached wider audiences because they were more widely available, not only to those who bought them but to anybody who would listen to them being read out aloud in public places in the capital, in other towns and in the provinces where they would be sold by flying stationers and hawkers.

Chapter Twelve

THE MARKET FOR THE NEWS IN SCOTLAND Stephen W. Brown

The Uniqueness of the Scottish Market: Law, Theology and Medicine Uninterrupted runs of Scottish eighteenth-­century newspapers are rare. Cheap, folio pages challenge most binders, and when finally bound in volumes, challenge most library shelves. Nevertheless, in 1776 the Caledonian Mercury urged its subscribers ‘to preserve their papers carefully, and bind them up’. This unusual advice was ‘particularly recommend[ed] . . . to Universities, and others who keep libraries of books’ (2 July 1776, 2). John Robertson, the publisher of the Caledonian Mercury, knew what he was doing in targeting the university market. Having purchased the Mercury four years earlier from the family of Thomas R ­ uddiman – p ­ ublisher of Scotland’s first medical periodical and Keeper of the Advocates’ L ­ ibrary (now the National Library of Scotland) – ­ he was well aware that universities were the training ground for the professions, fundamentally shaping the Scottish market for news: theology, the law and medicine. These were the subjects driving the Enlightenment and enrolment at Scotland’s universities, especially Edinburgh (Sher 1985: 27–31). The most complete collections of eighteenth-­century Scottish newspapers now reside principally with the nation’s academic and legal institutions. The Advocates’ Library is perhaps the richest source of pre-­1800 Scottish periodicals. The Signet Library, serving Edinburgh’s other legal society, the Writers to the Signet, is not far behind. Advocates and solicitors were a ready market, especially for local and regional business news (Craig 1931: 81). The publisher of the Mercury understood this; after all, the relationship between Edinburgh’s printers and the courts in Scotland had long been symbiotic: Scottish law 285

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required every court case to be printed in all its aspects, with copies of the proceedings circulated to the presiding justices, to the jurors and to all those involved in the prosecution and the defence (Finlay 2012: 51). Thus Petitions, Memorials and ­Answers – ­as the documents were ­known – ­account for the vast majority of all titles published in eighteenth-­century Edinburgh, something the ESTC decisively demonstrates (Brown 2012: 14–18). The proceedings for the regular sittings or sessions of the High Court were bound and collected by the legal community, just as magazines were by subscribers. These Session Papers, as they came to be known, appeared in serial fashion at regular intervals and essentially comprise Scotland’s first law journal. A curious incident in 1791 tested this alliance between printer and lawyer. The printers Mundell and Son were served by their landlord with an order to vacate their premises because the noise from their first-­floor presses interfered with the building’s other occupants. In petitioning the court to reverse the order, Mrs Mundell’s counsel observed that there were some dozen printers, all similarly situated around Parliament Square, close to the High Court. Were Mundell to be removed beyond the town limits, the precedent could lead to the eviction of all the printers located in the town centre. Such action, Mundell’s petition argued, would profoundly disrupt the business of the law. The presiding judge, Lord Gardenstone, grasped Mundell’s meaning immediately and reversed the decision (Sessions Papers, Signet Library 1785–91, 183, item 12: 8). Lawyers were not the only learned market for and creators of the news in Scotland. Ecclesiastics comprised another. The Union of 1707 left the courts and the presbytery to fill the governance vacuum. Consequently, alongside High Court Sessions, the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland convened annually in Edinburgh. Accounts of these Kirk Sessions provided essential copy for the Edinburgh newspapers, while attracting subscribers from across Scotland. Even displacing crucial income-­generating advertisements, Kirk news filled daily columns; when the Scots Magazine was established, it set aside a separate section to cover the Assembly. The Kirk Sessions also had their own judiciary whose courts occasionally rehearsed the sort of scandals that sold newspapers. Yet a third profession contributed to the learned definition of ‘news’: the nation’s medical fraternity. The first serial intended exclusively for this market, Medical Essays and Observations, appeared in 1733 and eventually comprised five volumes through 1744. It reached London and Dublin, and was published in Paris as Essais et observations de medicines de la Société d’Edinbourg (1740). A second medical

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periodical, Essays and Observations, printed by the Edinburgh firm of Gavin Hamilton and John Balfour in 1754, and continued by Balfour until 1771, would reach markets in the Low Countries, England, Ireland and America. The Medical and Philosophical Commentaries followed in 1773. Unlike its predecessors whose periodic appearances were irregular, the Commentaries was a quarterly. Edited by Dr John Duncan, printed in Edinburgh by William Smellie and published by the London-­based Scot John Murray, it was succeeded by the Annals of Medicine (1796–1804), published by Mudie and Son in Edinburgh for G. G. & J. Robinson in London. The Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, first published in 1788 and 1792 respectively, were (and still are) periodicals designed for readers eager for news of advances in various scientific and historical fields. They found lucrative markets in England, Ireland and America, as well as on the Continent. While legal and religious news was p ­ arochial – ­after all, the country’s law and religion were uniquely ­Scottish – ­medical and scientific news transcended national character and boundaries.

Establishing a Market for News Thus the markets for news were as diverse as the news itself. However, in Scotland, none of these markets was evident during the early evolution of newspapers. Between 1640 and 1698 at least twenty-­three titles were published. They retailed the news in a variety of formats: folios, quartos of 4–16 pages, octavos of 8–12 pages, one monthly and a duodecimo. Many were newsbooks or news-­sheets, bearing little resemblance to what newspapers would become in the eighteenth century (Fox 2020: 76–8). Manuscript newsletters still arrived from London and the Continent, and made the rounds of Scotland’s taverns and Edinburgh’s nascent coffee house scene. Those printed all originated in either Edinburgh or Leith. The first to appear, Diurnal Occurrances (1642), merely reprinted its London original, as did many of the periodicals that followed. Some were Edinburgh products, but although compiled in the capital, their content was a miscellany of excerpts from the London press. With no attempt to identify an indigenous Scottish market, most were propaganda disseminated from the South, as the titles indicated: the Kingdom’s Intelligencer – to Prevent False News (1661), the Test Paper and Public Occurrences Truely [sic] Stated (both 1688), the Christian Diurnal (1688) and the Orange Gazette (1689). All folded quickly. With little revenue from advertising, only modest circulation, and ongoing dependence on patronage, none proved profitable,

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and all were hamstrung by the scrutiny of the Scottish Privy Council, which granted ‘authority to print’ and approved content, further limiting the market by circumscribing the news and suppressing local matter (Mann 2000: 149–53). One innovative venture, the Bibliotheca Universalis, or an Historical Accompt of Books and Transactions of the Learned World (January 1688), might have become Scotland’s first literary review. A monthly duodecimo of 128 pages, it promised to report ‘what is doing abroad by the learned ­world . . . ­and what the virtuosos [sic] and learned among ourselves are pleased to communicate’ (Couper 1908, I: 193–4). But it was suppressed on religious grounds by the Privy Council after its first issue. Government control of the press in general was strict, with particular attention paid to the circulation of the news (Mann 2000: 19–21). The first two decades of the next century saw another twenty-­eight periodicals appear, with no clear marketing strategy emerging until two competing p ­ublishers – J­ames Donaldson and Adam B ­ oig – ­stumbled onto a winning formula. They partnered with Edinburgh’s two leading printers, who themselves would be involved in a dozen serial titles: James Watson, whose Preface to The Art Of Printing (1708) modernised the trade in Scotland, and the firm of John Reid Sr and his son. These four established the standard layout and the business practices that would define Scottish newspapers throughout the eighteenth century. They also identified Scotland’s two enduring markets: Jacobites and Whigs, whose lines of animosity were drawn in 1642, when the Whiggamore faction marched on Edinburgh in opposition to the Stuart monarchy. But Donaldson and Boig were true entrepreneurs, unlike the capital’s previous newspaper proprietors. Where their predecessors were primarily motivated by political or religious allegiances, Donaldson and Boig were driven principally by the sensible belief that a newspaper should be a profitable venture with a business plan. Their efforts anticipated the marketing strategies later employed by eighteenth-­ century Scotland’s two most successful papers: the Edinburgh Evening Courant (1718–1886) and the Caledonian Mercury (1720–1867). Donaldson made the first move, enlisting Watson as his printer, and launching the Edinburgh Gazette on 28 February 1699, a twice-­weekly, single-­page paper. The first two numbers sold out quickly, and each was immediately reprinted. By number 17, whole sets were advertised for sale, with occasional supplements or Gazettes Extraordinary (Couper 1908, I: 204). On 10 March Donaldson secured the Privy Council’s ‘authority’, the government licence that granted exclusive rights to print the news in Scotland. With the ‘mystical words, Printed

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by Authority’ (Couper 1908, I: 205) added to the Gazette’s masthead, Donaldson essentially had a national monopoly (Mann 2000: 147–8). He used this official stamp of approval to persuade the Convention of Scottish Burghs to advise its members to subscribe to the Gazette and exclude the London papers. Stirling and Montrose were among those that followed this advice. It was a stroke of marketing genius. Donaldson’s success was gradual but steady, though not without impediments. As he developed a sustainable market, at least one former newspaper publisher, Mrs Anderson, who had inherited her husband’s pervasive printing interests and previously secured the Privy Council’s ‘authority’, contested his licence. Donaldson’s printing alliance with James Watson was also challenged, first by Mrs Anderson and then by John Reid Sr, with whom Watson had previously partnered. These aggressive intrusions attested to the financial potential that Donaldson was unlocking. His readership grew sufficiently to allow him to step away from his anonymous patron, and the paper outran its rivals for six years until February 1705, when the Edinburgh Courant was published by Adam Boig. The success of the Gazette had created a growing demand for the news in Edinburgh and across Scotland, as well as a potentially lucrative advertising market. Boig convinced the Privy Council to grant a second licence, and recruited Donaldson’s original printer, James Watson, whose professional standards immediately gave the Courant a superior look. But Boig’s principal innovation was a commitment to what would become the shipping news. He recruited agents in Scotland’s coastal towns to communicate to the Courant ‘the remarkable foreign newes from the ports within the Kingdom, when ships comes [sic] and goes and from whence’ (Couper 1908, I: 216). Boig also pursued advertisements more aggressively than Donaldson by establishing daily business hours at the Exchange Coffee House: between February and June 1705 his Courant printed 466 adverts. But on 23 June one of these advertisements led to the Privy Council withdrawing Boig’s licence for more than three months. The Courant was renewed in October with issue number 55. Boig would prove a serious adversary for Donaldson, undercutting his sales and taking away advertising to the point that the Gazette was temporarily shut down early in 1706. Donaldson then reconceived the paper as a quarto of 4–8 pages, published on Mondays and Thursdays. The first number declared that the new format was intended ‘for the more Convenient binding [for] those who keep Collections, and to begin a number of new every Year’ (Edinburgh Gazette, 25 April 1706, 1). Here Donaldson saw an opportunity to expand the market by advancing the notion that John Robertson was to reiterate in 1776 with

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Figure 12.1  The Edinburgh Courant, 55, 25 June–8 October 1705, page 1 (Reproduced with permission from the National Library of Scotland, GIVB.2/20(1-))

his Caledonian Mercury, that ephemeral newspapers had lasting value as bound volumes, thereby transforming the news into history and giving advertisements shelf life. This new Gazette generated at least a page of advertising per issue. The printing, however, was of inferior quality: the Reids were now associated with Boig, and Watson was engaged with his own Paris Gazette, which offered more continental news than either Boig or Donaldson. This second Edinburgh Gazette consequently closed in October, only to be revived by Donaldson on 25 March 1707 as a single folio appearing on Tuesdays and Thursdays, until August 1708 when Donaldson again reconceived it as the Scots Postman. In both instances the Reids returned as his printer. Donaldson then brought out yet another version of the Edinburgh Gazette in August 1709 which became the Scots Postman, or the New Edinburgh Gazette in December of that year. Meanwhile, Boig’s Edinburgh Courant prospered, until his sudden death on 27 January 1710. Its success had been such that the title

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was taken up by Daniel Defoe, who printed two issues. Defoe’s claim threatened the paper’s Scottish identity, so carefully nurtured by Boig, and exasperated the disgruntled opponents of the Union of 1707. That nationalist faction, headed by John Reid Jr, established the Scots Courant as the true cultural extension of Boig’s newspaper; their first issue was numbered 707, continuing Boig’s serialisation. James Watson, who was perhaps the most active Jacobite voice against the Union and who had reasserted vernacular Scots with his Choice Collection of Comic and Serious Scots Poems (1706–11), took over printing the thrice-­weekly, single-­sheet folio on 12 May 1710.

Developing the Market The market continued to be volatile for the next eight years, with at least nine titles coming and going, including yet another Edinburgh Gazette (9 March 1714–15 March 1715). The one common thread, however, was a commitment to grow Scottish content and local news, as well as a steady increase in advertising. Scottish news had matured into a marketable product after the Union in 1707, and the uprising of 1715 initiated a volatile national narrative around Jacobitism. The daily political and business news now originated in Edinburgh, not London, and Scots identity was a selling point. Nevertheless, progress came in fits and starts. The Gazette and the Courant had regular Edinburgh columns, but these were often simply preludes to advertisements, as in the Courant, number 459, where two items appeared under the heading ‘Edinburgh’, one about the arrival of the Earl of Murray from London and the other a tabulation of the ‘Prices of Victuals at Haddington’, followed by twenty-­seven local advertisements: goods and produce for sale, lost items, shipping news, rewards for the return of stolen property and intelligence about a runaway indentured servant (Edinburgh Courant, 9 August 1708, 2). All of which provides a necessary reminder that advertisements are actually local news of a sort that accurately profiles a paper’s market. Watson’s two Tatler publications present a striking example of an original Edinburgh serial outselling its London inspiration. The first (1710) was a reprint of Richard Steele’s London original. But the second (1711) was an entirely Scottish work, written by Robert Hepburn, a young law student who replaced Steele’s Isaac Bickerstaff with his own Scots persona, Donald MacStaff, and wrote twice-­ weekly papers satirising Edinburgh society and manners (Mathison 2005: 152–4). Hepburn’s Tatler proved more popular in Edinburgh than the reprint, no doubt drawing in part upon the resurgence of

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interest in native authors brought about by Watson’s Choice Collection. Conflicting notions of identity would henceforth define Scottish journalism; and Donaldson and Boig were the first to pitch their rival tents in the opposing camps of North Britons and Jacobites. That divided allegiance would persist through the rebellion of 1745 into the radical years of the 1790s. When the Edinburgh Evening Courant appeared in 1718, on Mondays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, the Privy Council had been disbanded, and authority to print the news was now irregularly granted by town councils, until the phrase ‘By Authority’ gradually disappeared from mastheads in the 1720s. It would, however, return briefly during the occupation of Edinburgh in 1745 (Brown 2014: 72–4). The Evening Courant introduced what its publisher, James McEuen, called ‘Home-­ News’, a column regularly dedicated to Scottish concerns, although he would complain that the magistrates were especially strict in monitoring anything published about local affairs and seized issues in February 1723. Among other innovations, McEuen bypassed London and corresponded directly with the continental newspapers such that he could announce that his Edinburgh readers who had ‘London papers sent to them, have laid them aside because [the Evening Courant] contains the substance not only of them but of the foreign posts’ (Couper 1908, II: 21). Further, he offered attractive discounts to subscribers, and used his own London bookshop both to distribute the Evening Courant to London readers and to ensure its timely appearance in London coffee houses. McEuen proved adept at soliciting advertisements, pursuing property and land sales in particular, and he established credibility for his news reports by making all the foreign and London papers from which he drew content available at Edinburgh’s Royal Coffee House. He was a vocal supporter of the Union, declaring that the Evening Courant was ‘very well-­liked by all except the violent Jacobites’ (Chambers 1861, III: 439). The Courant’s reputation as an ally to Westminster continued when its ownership passed to the Fleming family (1732) and then to David Ramsay (1785). Throughout the eighteenth century such loyalty was rewarded with government advertising, often valued at £500 per annum. McEuen had the market to himself for two years, until William Adams Jr and William Rolland launched the Caledonian Mercury in 1720. Its Scottishness, as opposed to the Britishness of the Evening Courant, was apparent from the outset, conspicuously asserted in various masthead woodcuts of the Scottish Arms, Scotia with Mercury, and the Thistle. Its Jacobitism was as explicit as the authorities would allow and targeted the same market that had welcomed Watson’s Choice

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Collection of Scots Poems (1706–11). It is no coincidence that, in the same year that the Caledonian Mercury appeared, McEuen published his Edinburgh Miscellany, a collection of recent Scottish poetry in ‘proper’ English, designed to counter the revival of the Scots vernacular and the editorial stance of the Caledonian Mercury – whose title was a less-­than-­subtle dog whistle summoning the Jacobite market. A six-­ page folio like the Courant, the Mercury was issued thrice-­weekly and matched McEuen’s annual subscription price and his promise of home delivery within the town and throughout the capital’s suburbs. But the Mercury lagged behind the Courant in advertising and required twenty numbers before managing its first full page of ads (12 June 1720). In 1724 Thomas Ruddiman joined Rolland, but despite his improvements in the typography, Rolland’s mismanagement of subscriptions kept the Mercury in financial turmoil (Couper 1908, II: 44–5). Stability came only in 1736, when Thomas and his brother Walter Ruddiman Sr assumed ownership. The paper remained with the family until its sale to John Robertson in May 1772, whose proprietorship continued until July 1790, when it was acquired by John Allan. That the Edinburgh Evening Courant and the Caledonian Mercury each had only three owners from their founding until the end of the eighteenth century testifies to the profitability of the markets they established. But it had taken some sixty years for Scotland to develop a news industry, and it was clear that such a market was only sustainable in the capital. Before 1725 Edinburgh saw at least fifty newspapers of one sort or another come and go, usually in less than a year. During the same period Glasgow attempted one, Donald Govan’s Glasgow Courant, subsequently the West-Country Intelligence (1715–16). No other effort was made in Glasgow until Andrew Stalker and Alexander Carlile’s Glasgow Journal in 1741. They had just two competitors for some time, both religious serials: the Glasgow-Weekly-History, dedicated to the Progress of the Gospel at Home and Abroad (1742) and An Exhortation to the Inhabitants of the South Parish of Glasgow (1750). The evangelical character of the west of Scotland acted to the detriment of Glasgow’s news market until well into the eighteenth century, when trade in tobacco and sugar made Glasgow a principal port and a business hub (Moss 2012: 156–61). The Drumfries [sic] Mercury (1721) was the only other paper to appear outside Edinburgh before James Chalmers’ Aberdeen Journal in 1748. The market for news in Scotland until the mid-­eighteenth century was as stark as the nation’s landscape. Edinburgh alone had the demographic to sustain two newspapers (Pittock 2019: 60–71): it was home to a sizeable intellectual community, an evolving economy

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requiring reliable access to news affecting trade and banking, and a growing local retail and real estate sector, providing lucrative advertising. In fact, advertising determined the fate of all serial publications in eighteenth-­century Scotland, as it did in England (Harris 2009: 421–2). No genuine market threat to the Evening Courant and the Caledonian Mercury arose in the capital until 1759, when the Edinburgh Chronicle appeared. Launched on 22 March, it was the product of a formidable trio: John Balfour, Gavin Hamilton and Patrick Neill, all ­key – ­even ­controversial – p ­ layers in the Edinburgh book trade. Their plans were ambitious: by combining the utility of a newspaper’s reportage and advertising with the cultural entertainment of a magazine’s poetry and essays and a review’s literary criticism, the investors promised a hybrid publication (McDougall 1991: 24–8). They also committed to promoting Scottish culture, especially the nation’s literary output; something Hamilton and Balfour had attempted with their seminal Edinburgh Review (1755–56), which had included Adam Smith, William Robertson and Hugh Blair among its contributors. The publishers invited ‘the learned and ingenious of this ­country . . . ­to contribute their endeavours to render this undertaking a national advantage’ (Edinburgh Chronicle, 22 March 1759, 1). Such ‘endeavours’ included the first regular theatre reviews in any Scottish periodical, written anonymously by a young James Boswell. The Chronicle seemed positioned to redefine Scotland’s news market. Even the Glasgow Herald complained of its encroachment on its territory, when the Chronicle pursued subscribers in Glasgow; for two decades prior, Scotland’s five dominant newspapers in Aberdeen, Edinburgh and Glasgow had a tacit understanding not to intrude on one another’s subscriptions, which effectively ring-­fenced the income from local advertisements (Brown 2012: 360). But the Chronicle’s initial success was thwarted by a concerted effort on the part of the publishers of the Edinburgh Courant and the Caledonian Mercury to starve it of advertising. This had an immediate and dramatic effect. By December 1759 the Chronicle had trouble putting together even a single column of advertisements, while the two long-­established papers regularly filled three of their now four folio pages. The Chronicle declined from three to two issues, and finally to a single weekly issue, before folding on 8 October 1760 (Brown 2008: 122–6). Protecting a newspaper’s advertising sources from poaching had become so fundamental to ensuring financial success that in February 1757 the Commissioners of Supply for the County of Aberdeen suggested that their two local papers, the Journal and the

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Intelligencer, merge to better serve those ‘who had occasion to advertise’ and thus save ‘half the expense’ (Craig 1931: 53). James Chalmers, publisher of the Journal, likely initiated the proposal to facilitate his hostile takeover of the rival Intelligencer. The Evening Courant and the Caledonian Mercury did eventually share their market with two other newspapers. The Edinburgh Weekly Journal (1757–69) was partly owned by the Ruddiman family through Walter Jr, and, as it appeared at seven-­day intervals, was not a direct competitor, unlike the Chronicle. The Edinburgh Advertiser (1764–1859) was founded by Alexander Donaldson, grandson of the publisher of the original Edinburgh Gazette, and printed on Tuesdays and Fridays, thus giving Edinburgh near-­daily access to news and advertising. Once the Advertiser was launched, the Ruddimans withdrew from the Weekly Journal, leaving it to their partners, William Auld and William Smellie. It folded in 1769. Published as a quarto, the Advertiser biannually provided title pages and indices gratis to its subscribers, encouraging them to collect and bind their papers. This latter innovation was designed to entice advertisers with the prospect of their ads enduring longer than those printed in standard folio newspapers, precisely because they were more likely to be bound and preserved. But the addition of an index went further: it transformed the news into history and the Advertiser into a reference work. The Donaldson family’s dominance in the Edinburgh reprint trade was also no small factor in their success. They formed a syndicate with the publishers of the Evening Courant and the Caledonian Mercury that effectively cornered the advertising market through price fixing and an agreed set of rules which controlled the solicitation and billing for advertisements, including regulations for granting credit and collecting outstanding debts. The agreement was announced in banner headlines throughout September 1768 (Brown 2008: 132–3). The syndicate stood unchallenged until 1790, when James Sibbald established the Edinburgh Herald (1790–1806), followed by the radical Edinburgh Gazetteer (16 November 1792–10 December 1793) and the official government newspaper, the Edinburgh Gazette, first issued on 2 July 1793, and later briefly edited by Dugald Stewart. The Scots Chronicle followed in 1796, declaring itself independent of party interests, while insisting that ‘the effusions of party passion or prejudice [would] have no admission into [its pages]’ (1 March 1796, 1). At least a dozen other newspapers appeared during the 1790s, in response to the French Revolution and Westminster’s moves against sedition. All were short-­lived. Elsewhere in Scotland, the market grew intermittently. Glasgow’s original Herald (1741) and Courant (1745)

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merged in 1760 for want of sufficient advertising revenue. No competitor attempted the market until 1778, when the Glasgow Mercury appeared, followed by the Advertiser in 1783. The former folded in 1796, but the latter survived and evolved into today’s Herald, no doubt because its publisher, John Mennons, had learned the newspaper business in the hard-­knocks school of Edinburgh, where he attempted several news serials and magazines, only to be thwarted by the syndicate so effectively sustained by the Ruddimans, Donaldson, Robertson and Fleming (Brown 2012: 361–2). Aberdeen, in turn, had only its Journal; Dundee, nothing after the faint attempt of its Weekly Intelligencer in 1755. Beyond Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen, there were only two newspapers: the Dumfries Weekly Journal (1777–1835), which published the first memoir of Burns (August 1796), and the Kelso Chronicle (1783–1803). Those seeking newspapers in any of the small markets subscribed to the city papers and even advertised in them. Without retail centres or property to rent or sell, regional markets could not provide the advertising requisite to sustaining serial news.

Magazines: Marketing the News as History The news did not come cheaply. With the Stamp Act of 1712, the government required all newspapers to be printed on officially stamped paper, taxed at one penny per sheet, while at the same time levying a further duty of one shilling for each advertisement. The Act was a passive form of press control but also an acknowledgement of the significant profits being derived from serials (Rose 2009: 129–30). The requirement to use paper bearing a government stamp applied only to those printing the news at intervals of seven days or less, so that bi-­ monthly and monthly publications were excluded, although still subject to the tax on advertisements. John Mennons tried to circumvent the Act with his Edinburgh Eighth Day Magazine in 1779, but it was shut down after six months ‘for publishing ­news . . . ­upon unstamped paper’ (Eighth Day Magazine, 19 May 1780, 1). To some extent, the stamp duty mapped the markets for newspapers and magazines. The rates were increased at regular intervals throughout the eighteenth century and contributed directly to controlling the number of successful newspapers in Scotland, where the market beyond Edinburgh was limited. Consequently, provincial Scotland saw more magazines than it did newspapers because magazines were exempt from using stamped paper. After the launch of the Scots Magazine in 1739, twenty-­one magazines appeared in Edinburgh, nineteen beyond the capital. Of those,

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Glasgow saw eight, Aberdeen four, Dundee three, Perth two, and Berwick and Dumfries one each. But the format was established by the Scots Magazine, derived largely from London’s Gentleman’s Magazine. Unlike the newspapers, news was reported retrospectively as ‘Foreign and Domestic History’; local affairs were often headed ‘Domestic Occurrences’. Poetry, reviews and essays, both original and reprinted, comprised the entertainment. Announcements of marriages, births, deaths and official appointments increasingly appeared and were often billed as advertisements. The cover for the May 1754 Scots Magazine solicited these from ‘persons who would have justice done themselves and their r­ elations . . . ­in a collection calculated principally for Scotland’, acknowledging the magazine’s role in recording history. Where newspapers were largely of one species, the taxonomy of magazines evolved to reflect niche markets, including agriculture, religion, medicine, music and Freemasonry. Learned journals were the earliest specialist periodicals, if not exactly magazines by pedigree. All had one thing in common: their publishers provided annual title pages, prefaces, tables of contents, indices, additional engravings and binding instructions, with the assumption that their publications had enriched market value as reference works. The Scots Magazine entered a marketplace already well served in Scotland by the Gentleman’s Magazine and the London Magazine. But unlike their insolvent predecessors, William Sands, Andrew Brymer, Andrew Murray and James Cochran, the founders of the Scots Magazine, had a long-­range business strategy. The Preface to their first collected volume criticised the domination of the Scottish market by English periodicals, ‘calculated for the good of Great Britain [with] Scotland . . . little more than nominally considered’ (Scots Magazine 1739: ii). The founders clearly grasped the essential business principle of reinvestment, setting aside any immediate ‘desire of gain’, so that profits might ‘be carefully applied toward making this Magazine more acceptable’ (1739: iii). They were businessmen for whom patriotism was more product than politics: they side-­stepped the partisanship of the Evening Courant and the Mercury, ‘to avoid offering what some will admire whilst others disapprove’ (1739: iv). This claim to even-­handedness would be severely tested during the 1745 rebellion, just six years after its launch, when the Scots Magazine attempted to occupy a neutral zone between the political territories of the Jacobite Caledonian Mercury and the Hanoverian Edinburgh Evening Courant. The Preface to the 1746 volume observed that ‘the bare assertion of no party’ could justify its actions; the Scots Magazine

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‘would do justice to all sides’ without ‘attachment to any one’ for whenever ‘any man or party decline a full inquiry into their principles or practices, ­we . . . ­cannot help suspecting that they see truth against them’ (Scots Magazine 1746: iii–iv). It was a brave editorial stance, but Scotland was not yet ready for such journalistic integrity (Benchimol 2013: 94–6). Consequently, in 1747 the Scots Magazine found itself engaged in a two-­year market battle with the British Magazine, or London and Edinburgh Intelligencer, whose publishers were determined to punish it for portraying Jacobites equally with the government. The demise of its competitor in 1749 did little to restore the Scots Magazine’s reputation; as late as 1754, when a History of the Rebellion in 1745 and 1746 was published in Aberdeen, based largely on excerpts from the Scots Magazine, its editors had to defend their source’s ‘impartiality’ and distinguish the magazine’s accounts from ‘the party zeal so obvious in others’ (Douglas 1755: iii). This defence did not prevent the Edinburgh Review from damning the Scots Magazine in its critique of the History of the Rebellion (1755, 1, 24). Nevertheless, ten years after the rebellion, Douglas had turned to bound volumes of the Scots Magazine for a historical record, because the 1745 newspapers were long gone. News became history when translated into magazines, and that was a highly marketable product. The Scottish market for the news was not just about politics; since 1745 civility had come to matter as much as Whig or Tory sentiments. Blatant incivility would bring down the Edinburgh Magazine and Review (1773–76), arguably Scotland’s most innovative magazine before 1800. Published by Charles Elliot and William Creech, the two most successful booksellers in the second half of the century, printed by William Smellie, and co-­edited by him and Gilbert Stuart, it was distributed by the London-­based bookseller John Murray, who was determined to make it the first Scottish periodical to profit in London, Dublin and across the colonies. The magazine was frank and ad hominen, eschewing the puffery, self-­promotions and simple précis that characterised other magazines and reviews. This approach, while achieving notoriety, led to crippling libel litigation (Zachs 1992: 63–96). Still, the Edinburgh Magazine and Review established the ­abrasive – ­even ­pugilistic – ­Scottish style in book reviewing ultimately perfected by its successor, the second Edinburgh Review (1802). When Creech subsequently published his literary magazines, the Mirror (1779) and the Lounger (1785), he demurely avoided anything that would threaten his bottom line. The Scots Magazine had only a few successful r­ivals – W ­ alter Ruddiman Jr’s Weekly Magazine (1768–84), James Sibbald’s

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Edinburgh Magazine (1785–1802) and James Anderson’s the Bee (1792–4) – but surpassed them all in its use of engraved plates to drive circulation. Engravings were the chief selling feature of most magazines. But they were costly and only established periodicals with healthy subscriptions could afford to include engravings in every issue. The Scots Magazine was slow in adopting plates. In fact, Scotland had just one reliable engraver in the decade before the magazine launched (Rock 2012: 81–91). The magazine’s first plates occur in volumes 3, 5 and 9, becoming regular with volume 15. Engraved plates were the one feature uniquely separating magazines from newspapers. While the latter might use woodcuts, especially for shipping news, the cost of plates was prohibitive for ephemeral publications; they were, however, valued by magazine subscribers. During his tenure as editor of the Scots Magazine (1760–65), William Smellie made engravings a priority and enlisted the engraver Andrew Bell as a regular contributor, commissioning original work and reproductions of the best London illustrations, including Hogarth’s. Some of Bell’s plates for Smellie were extravagant and expensive, such as the full-­size fold-­out of William Maitland’s highly sought-­after view of the London parishes from his 1739 History of London, which appeared in the Scots Magazine in August 1761. Bell and Smellie would continue their partnership in the first edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. Their experience with the magazine format, in fact, led them in the first instance to propose the Britannica to subscribers as a serial octavo. Apparently, Bell and Smellie initially thought of their encyclopaedia, both in format and marketability, more as a magazine than an Encyclopédie. Attracting subscriptions was a constant challenge for newcomers to the Scottish market. One promotion saw magazines give books in parts gratis with each number over the course of a year. It was an expensive gamble, what we might call a ‘loss leader’. The first publishers to do so in Scotland were Gilbert Martin and John Wotherspoon. Their Edinburgh Museum, or North-British Magazine (1763–64) promised that The Ancient Universal History of all Nations, a ‘Work, [that] from its great extent both of bulk and price is scarcely attainable but by persons of easy and affluent fortunes . . .will be thrown gratis into the hands of every subscriber to this periodical’ (Edinburgh Museum 1763: iv). Subscribers next received The Lives of Illustrious British Seamen. Curiously, the ESTC shows no record of either of these titles outside their publication by Martin and Wotherspoon. In 1773 Robert Morison’s failing Perth Magazine (1772–73) offered gratis, over eight numbers,

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Figure 12.2  Title page of The General History of the World offered gratis by the Edinburgh Museum (Courtesy of Stephen Brown)

Henry Adamson’s seventeenth-­ century satirical verse-­ histories of Perth: The Inventarie of the Gabions and The Muses’ Threnodie (Brown 2006: 65–6). Perhaps the most audacious promotion came at the height of the sedition crisis in 1792, when the incendiary Historical Register offered subscribers the banned pamphlet Letter to the Right Honourable Mr Secretary Dundas from Thomas Paine. The Register’s editor facetiously wrote on the wrappers of the April 1792 issue that it had caused him ‘no small Pain’ to hear ‘the Public begin to s­ peak . . . ­with scurrility’ of his periodical (NAS, CS 237 S 9/1). That same cover also reprinted a suppressed anti-­slavery poem by the English radical publisher Daniel Isaac Eaton (see Figure 12.3). Yet sales increased: to this day, ‘scurrility’ in its many forms stimulates the public appetite for news. Later that year the Historical Register further tempted buyers with a free portrait of Thomas Paine.

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Figure 12.3  The Historical Register, April 1792 (Courtesy of Stephen Brown)

Advertising: Selling the Market for News In 1776 John Robertson gave Scotland its first authentic daily by publishing the thrice-­weekly Caledonian Gazetteer, in alternation with his other thrice-­weekly paper, the Caledonian Mercury, thus providing access to the news from Mondays through Saturdays. Robertson’s gamble had two motives. First, his Mercury, not unlike the Evening Courant, was taking in so many advertisements that column space for the news was minimalised. However, while Robertson had sufficient advertising to support six issues a week, he lacked sufficient copy for two thrice-­weeklies (Couper 1908, II: 143–4). He consequently folded the Gazetteer and experimented with a five-­day Mercury, skipping Thursdays, when there was no post from London. That too proved unsustainable, and Edinburgh lost its first true daily after only a few months. However, the Ruddimans had already found a way to take advantage of the advertisers who could not find space in the city’s three newspapers. After selling their interest in the Caledonian Mercury

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to Robertson, they put all their energy into developing the Weekly Magazine, or Edinburgh Amusement. The Amusement resurrected the format of the Edinburgh Chronicle, combining news with literary entertainment, especially poetry. Although best remembered for introducing Robert Fergusson’s vernacular verse, its chief innovation was its extensive advertising. Essentially a weekly newspaper, its title was intended to avoid stamp duty, but unlike other magazines, the Weekly Amusement traded aggressively in advertisements. Curiously, no eighteenth-­century publishers printed ads inside magazines, considering that space the property of the purchasers. The Scots Magazine drew an interesting distinction between the wrappers and the text. It guaranteed that ads would give its ‘­readers . . . ­no cause to complain of encroachments made on their property [because] the cover of the Magazine shall be the place’ where such notices would appear (Scots Magazine 1740: 568). Magazine proprietors considered their customers to have purchased only the contents; the covers belonged to the publishers. Walter Ruddiman Jr was the first to dedicate his magazine’s covers exclusively to advertisements (Brown 2006: 61). Eventually, the Amusement’s four-­page wrapper carried as many as thirty advertisements a week at a profit of one shilling each. The financial rewards were considerable: with a weekly circulation of over 3,500 copies by December 1776, the Weekly Magazine was returning a profit at least £50 a month from ads alone. Competitors noticed, especially James Donaldson, who had recently taken over control of the Advertiser from his father Alexander. Donaldson likely drew the government’s attention to Ruddiman’s breach of the stamp duty, and in 1777 the Amusement was separated into a newspaper (Weekly Mercury) and a magazine (Weekly Magazine), each carrying advertisements, although the former now paid duty on paper. No other eighteenth-­ century Scottish magazine would match Ruddiman’s in mustering advertisements. Monthlies were hugely disadvantaged in the advertising market. Edinburgh businesses could advertise almost daily in the newspapers, making magazines a hard sell. But in 1754 the Scots Magazine came up with an interesting pitch. The second page of the May cover pointed out that as Advertisements on loose papers are usually thrown away, the impression they make can be of short continuance. If any traces of them remain on the memory, some of the essentials are very often f­orgot . . . ­persons sensible of these inconveniences, put

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Figure 12.4  Advertisements in the Weekly Magazine (Courtesy of Bill Zachs)

their advertisements on the cover of the Magazine. Here they are distributed through all the Kingdom; here they are preserved the whole year, and perhaps much longer. The pitch was clever, but newspapers never released their stranglehold on advertising. Other than ­Ruddiman – ­whose family was part of the syndicate controlling ­advertisements – ­few proprietors attracted more than two or three ads per number. Surviving covers suggest that the Scots Magazine never had more than eight, and was more likely to take in revenue from multi-­page book prospectuses, sewn into monthly issues. Newspaper advertising, on the other hand, grew exponentially throughout Scotland. On 16 March 1699 the Edinburgh Gazette had five advertisements; by 3 July 1799 the Caledonian Mercury had seventy-­two, several of which filled a third- to a half-­column. Front pages were often entirely advertising, the news displaced to page 2. On 6 December 1786 the Glasgow Mercury, an eight-­page quarto designed to emulate the Edinburgh Advertiser, had fifty-­seven ads, including one for real estate in Virginia and seventeen shipping ads, while the

Figure 12.5  The Scots Magazine, May 1754 (Reproduced with permission from the National Library of Scotland)

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Figure 12.6  The Glasgow Mercury with shipping advertisements, 6 December 1786 (Courtesy of Stephen Brown)

Glasgow Courant on 23 April 1799 had sixty-­one. The dominance of shipping news in the Glasgow press testified to the increased significance of trade with America and Jamaica. In Aberdeen, the Journal ran thirty-­ seven advertisements on 23 August 1790. By the mid-­1770s advertising often filled 75 per cent of both the Evening Courant and the Caledonian Mercury; the Advertiser was regularly selling four of its eight pages to retailers. The price of a newspaper in Scotland had risen from one penny in 1699 to four pence by the 1790s, but the rise in the cost of advertising testifies to the profitability of newspaper ownership: while the stamp duty per ad increased from one shilling in 1712 to three shillings in 1797, the cost to place an advertisement had risen from one shilling and six pence to six shillings (Dowell 1888, IV: 341–6). In its first month (December 1718), the Evening Courant ran nine advertisements; in 1752 it carried 3,672 for the year, and in 1793 the annual total exceeded 9,000. Several years of the Evening Courant’s advertising accounts survive in the National Library of Scotland and the Edinburgh Central

Figure 12.7  The Edinburgh Evening Courant, Thursday, 23 November 1752 (Reproduced with permission from the National Library of Scotland)

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Library. The records were kept daily in the margins and at the head of proof sheets, which were later bound, as illustrated in the issue for 28 December 1752. They indicate the amounts charged for each ad, the number of days the ad was to run, the individuals billed (often Writers to the Signet and booksellers, who seemed increasingly to have acted as agents by mid-­century), and the advertising profits accrued daily after duties and discounts were deducted. The Evening Courant’s accounts for the first two weeks of January 1776 record these profits per issue: Monday 1 January, £1 5s 6d; Wednesday 3 January, 13s 6d; Saturday 6 January, £2 2s 6d; Monday 8 January, 10s; Wednesday 10 January, £1, 11s; and Saturday 13 January, £1 3s 6d. Saturdays were often the most profitable, with a high for the year of £2 6s 6d taken on 26 October. By the 1790s advertisements might annually generate £500. Even the 1745 occupation of Edinburgh had not interfered with the advertising in the Courant and the Mercury (Brown 2015: 29–30). Throughout the eighteenth century classifications grew to include books, property, shipping, plays and concerts, retail, medicines, lectures and classes, government announcements, business transactions, legal notices, employment opportunities, charities, personals, thefts and lost items, coach services, horticulture, banking and investments. All were news of a kind, and no doubt more pertinent to readers than accounts from abroad and Westminster. Taken together, they are an accurate depiction of daily life and the demographic that comprised the marketplace for news in eighteenth-­century Scotland.

Conclusion Robert Burns might have edited eighteenth-­century Scotland’s most ambitious newspaper had the projected Scottish Chronicle (1788) not been withdrawn. The paper was conceived by William Smellie, successively the editor of the Scots Magazine (1760–65), the Weekly Journal (1765–68), the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1768–71) and the Edinburgh Magazine and Review (1773–76). He printed the first Edinburgh edition of Burns’s Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1787), becoming a close friend and political ally. But the Chronicle’s financial backing mysteriously disappeared just before its November launch, another victim of the capital’s closed market (NMS William Smellie MS, 78–9). Peter Williamson, who published two cheap weeklies, the Scots Spy (1776) and the New Scots Spy (1777), might have warned Smellie. He knew the power of ‘the Brethren’ who controlled Scottish journalism and grew their ‘News-­papers to an enormous size’ only to provide less matter and more advertising (Williamson 1769: ii). Williamson

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was right: the market for the news in eighteenth-­century Edinburgh belonged to the ad men, not the journalists.

Case Study 11: Newspaper Access and Distribution beyond the Scottish Capital: The Daily Practicalities Iain Beavan Access to printed materials in the cities, major townships and surrounding areas of Scotland was relatively easier (though not necessarily commonplace) than in the wider countryside. Getting hold of recent printed information could be distinctly problematic, as even in the early decades of the nineteenth century the majority of the population of Scotland (perhaps 70%) still lived in a rural environment. For example, during winter in Peterhead (population c. 2,550 in the 1790s) it is said that perhaps only five copies of the Aberdeen Journal were received (Johnston 1859: 28). Further, it should be remembered that in the Highlands, ‘before 1750 f­ew . . . ­besides the chiefs and their relatives had more than a smattering of English’ (Smout [1972] 1987: 242, 312), and Gaelic newspapers and periodicals simply were not produced before 1800. The infrastructure was slow to develop: roads and tracks were poor, and much of the West Highlands and Hebrides were not well served by postal services. Stornoway did not see a mail boat or post office until the mid-­eighteenth century (Walker 1808, II: 338). Even if access to printed materials was possible, levels of illiteracy were a factor in limiting actual readership (though a literate person could act as reader to an otherwise illiterate audience). According to one accepted measure, illiteracy among men in Scotland in the 1650s was over 55 per cent, and women were almost entirely illiterate. By the 1750s in Scotland, male illiteracy stood at about 22 per cent, and for females, a much higher 77 per cent (Houston 1982: 82, 90–1). John Spalding’s eyewitness report that Aberdeen in 1642 was receiving ‘printed paperis daylie cuming from London, called Diurnall Occurrances’ may have been broadly accurate in terms of frequency, but no inference can be made about quantity (Spalding 1828–29, II: 6). Spalding himself, a King’s College graduate, a committed episcopalian and diarist, was acutely ­concerned – a ­ long with civic leaders and members of the ­council – o ­ ver the religious and constitutional controversies of those difficult decades. In the following year, Spalding recorded his reading of the reports of the acceptance of the Solemn League and Covenant, and reassured himself that details in ‘both the printed Diurnalls and writtin Letteris’ were the same (Spalding 1828–29, II: 163). But he was one of relatively few in Aberdeenshire who could have done so.

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In the mid-­seventeenth century Scottish burghs beyond Edinburgh struggled for current information in printed form from beyond their boundaries. Over the Commonwealth and Restoration periods, and into the reigns of James VII and William and Mary, Glasgow, Aberdeen, Dumfries and Montrose councils all made special arrangements to obtain newspapers, through agents in either Edinburgh or London (Couper 1908, I: 207). But the quantities obtained were small. John Forbes, printer and bookseller in Aberdeen, was, in 1657, paid by the council for the supply of ‘fyften diornalls, at the magistrats ordor’, probably sent north from London (Aberdeen Burgh Council 1852: 181). In 1696 Dumfries Town Council stretched to a single copy of a newspaper for the benefit of the inhabitants (McDowall 1867: 555–6), and Stirling Council in 1665 sent a representative to Edinburgh to enter into an agreement with ‘Robert Mean, postmaster thairannent, for twa shilling sterling weeklie, as Glasgow and utheris burghs payes’ (Stirling Burgh Council 1887: 249). In 1699 Stirling Council decided to cancel its order for ‘Gazetts’ and the London-­printed Flying Post, and instead to be supplied at a cheaper overall price with ‘the Edinburgh Gazett, which containes both forreaigne and domestick occurrences’ (Stirling Burgh Council 1887: 90). Glasgow itself had initially aimed to obtain ‘weeklie, ane diurnall’ from London, but by 1663 had found it more efficient to turn to Robert Mein, Keeper of the Letter Office in Edinburgh (Glasgow Burgh Council 1881: 377; 1905: 20). Contractual arrangements could also be made by private individuals. In December 1700 the Edinburgh postmaster in a quasi-­legal letter agreed to ‘send to Mr. Archibald Dunbarr of Thundertown [Duffus parish, Morayshire] ane Flying Post, and Edinburgh Gazette, tuice a ­week . . . ­untill Candlemass [next year]’ (Dunbar 1865: 33). The common element that underpins these examples is that set of privileges claimed by some Post Office staff. Officers in charge of the post roads (Clerks of the Roads, who were employees of the Post Office) were allowed to frank newspapers and thereby send them post-­free, usually directed on to local or district postmasters. These local postmasters who had entered into arrangements with the Clerks of the Roads then delivered and sold the newspapers into a local and regional retail market that they (the local postmasters) had built up on their own initiative, and at whatever profit they could achieve. Business relationships between newspaper printers and Post Office officials were close: John Vint, printer of the London-­ published English Chronicle, recorded in its imprint that orders for the paper could be placed ‘by applying to the Publisher, or to the Clerks of the Roads at the General Post-­Office’ (see, for example, issue of 13–15 May 1790). Further detailed research is yet needed, but at least two major financial arrangements (profits-­ based, or agreed fee) seem to have been adopted by the Clerks. Profits to supplement their official salaries were generated by buying newspapers directly or

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indirectly from the printers at preferential rates, and then selling them ­on – ­and such appears to have been the case throughout Britain and Ireland (Journals of the House of Commons 1803: 998; Commissioners of Inquiry into Fees and Emoluments 1810: cxi; Joyce 1893: 192–3). In Ireland, a different approach was adopted by some for a time, whereby the newspaper printers paid the Clerks of the Roads a set sum to send the material post-­free (Byron 1762: 8). Not that the Post Office employees could be entirely trusted: in December 1759 Walter Ruddiman, printer of the Caledonian Mercury, had to apologise to William Duff, 1st Earl of Fife, in Banffshire for the failure of his lordship’s newspapers to arrive. Ruddiman laid the blame squarely on the Post Office, writing that ‘Country post-­masters not only read them, but lend them to their friends, by which they are both suddled and irregularly delivered’ (Aberdeen University: Special Collections. Papers of Duff House/Earls of Fife. Letter, Walter Ruddiman, Edinburgh to William Duff, Earl of Fife, Huntly, Aberdeenshire, 27 October 1759. MS 3175/1845/2). There was another w ­ ay – a ­ gain related to free postage p ­ rivileges – t­hat newspapers could be transported without charge. When Alexander Garden, MP for Aberdeenshire, died in 1785, the printer of the Aberdeen Journal, James Chalmers, had a double problem: how to get copies of his publication to London without spending money on postage; and conversely, how to get a sighting of London papers, again without undue expenditure. Chalmers, and many other newspaper printers of the time, had made use of the so-­called Franking Act of 1764 to send (under certain conditions) newspapers free of charge to a Member of Parliament. Such material could be forwarded, again without charge, by the said member. So Chalmers turned to James Duff, 2nd Earl of Fife and MP for Elginshire, to whose factor he explained, ‘It is only a matter of form, for the Address of a Member will make any number of papers pass free to any part of the Kingdom. The late Mr Garden had twenty or ­more . . . ­addressed to him’ (Aberdeen University: Special Collections. Tayler Genealogical Collection/Papers of the Duff Family of Duff House, and William Rose of Montcoffer, their Factor. Letter, James Chalmers to William Rose, 26 December 1785. MS 2226/40/2). Given the extent to which the privilege was used and abused throughout the country, the outcome of Chalmers’s approach is likely to have been positive. So how did prospective readers actually get newspapers in their hands? The answer is slightly different depending on whether or not the paper was (from the reader’s perspective) locally produced or from elsewhere. Living locally provided the opportunity to collect a paper from the back office of the publisher, from a bookseller in the same town or city acting as local agent, or from newsmen (‘hawkers that carry the news’) hired by the printer to deliver it. Those further distant were asked to place their order via the Post Office. The imprint of the Edinburgh-­printed Caledonian Mercury (9 August 1725) spelled

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out the options: the Mercury was ‘Sold at the Printing-­house in Morocco’s ­Closs . . . ­as also at the shop of Mr. Alexander Symmer, Bookseller in Parliament-­ Closs’, while others wanting copies ‘may be furnished by the several Posts, they agreeing with Mr. Weemiss at the Post-­office’. Those in the Highlands, however, had sometimes to turn to their own resources. While the post reached as far as Inveraray in Argyll and Inverness itself, local landowners in both localities clubbed together to employ a runner to the respective post offices to collect their newspapers and letters (M’Nicol 1791, I: 497; Fraser 1798, XX: 408). The author of The Former and Present State of Glasgow (Anon. 1787: 15) was not the first to rage against the perceived sinfulness of allowing a Sunday to become a post-­day in Glasgow. They called the Tontine Coffee Room, which opened around 1782, ‘a synagogue of Satan’ and railed against the degeneracy of the city, accusing the institution of allowing subscribers to sneak in through a discreetly opened back door on a Sunday. Putting aside the argument from Sabbatarianism, this tract is useful in further confirming the roles of coffee houses as providing important social spaces in which newspapers were consumed. This in itself is not remotely new, but it does provide an insight into the significant demand for information and comment in the eighteenth century within the educated and mercantile groups of Glasgow. It took until 1788 for a direct London–Glasgow (via Carlisle) mail coach route to be established, and this reduced delivery times to Glasgow itself to four days from five (Lang 1856: 15; Lewins 1865: 143), and provided a service to a city whose population at that time stood close to 46,000 (Cleland 1832: 205–6). Prior to that date newspapers from London arrived in Glasgow via an east coast route that absorbed westbound deliveries from Edinburgh. They arrived at about five o’clock in the morning to be met by members of the so-­called Morning Club who were desperate for political and business news. The Edinburgh papers that were particularly in demand in Glasgow mid-­ century were all well established, and their titles are not unexpected: the Edinburgh Evening Courant, the Caledonian Mercury and the Edinburgh Advertiser. And from London, the recently founded Star was highly regarded (Strang 1857: 100). There is an obvious general point to be made: the more frequently newspapers arrived from the capital cities, the more opportunities were available to printers in, say, Aberdeen and Glasgow, to paraphrase or directly quote from their contents, and the less critical it was to synchronise the days for the production of a local paper with a perhaps infrequent post. What became a more important consideration was for printers to settle on publication days when sales would not be hampered by those of local rivals. A description of the arrival of newspapers in Glasgow’s Tontine Coffee Room gives some idea of the level of anticipation among the members (largely

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from business and manufacturing sectors) who were subscribers to the institution’s facilities. During the Napoleonic Wars, the Tontine Coffee Room was not always an entirely orderly place. After the arrival of the London mail coach, the papers (apparently about sixty in number) would be gathered together and tossed into the middle of the coffee room’s floor, at which signal those present would run to the centre and grab whatever they could, often tearing the sheets as they did so. These performances were, however, brought to an end when one unlucky subscriber had two teeth knocked out in the resultant scramble (Senex 1884: 394–6). It was not only the cities that could lay claim to a coffee room. Kelso (population approx. 4,325 in the 1790s), which had the earliest known Scottish subscription library, also had a coffee room that apparently stocked (unnamed) newspapers from Edinburgh and London papers, as well as papers from Kelso itself (Manley 2012: 28; Douglas 1794, X: 597). Both the readership and newspaper printers themselves were very concerned over the timing of the arrival of the posts: it was no trivial matter, as the postal services and their officers played an active part, not just as providers of a method of distribution, but as active agents over much of the period under consideration. The supply of newspapers mattered because readers wanted and needed news of events and developments beyond their immediate locality; and printers sought to exploit, copy and summarise what was regarded as important and relevant in the other provincial and metropolitan papers. The advertisement in the London-­published Star (26 August 1791, 1) for the then proposed Glasgow Courant (begun the next month) played to its perceived strengths: a thrice-­weekly publication, and ‘from the early arrival of the Mail, must precede the EDINBURGH Newspapers, at least one post, in priority of intelligence from England’. By the 1790s access and accessibility to newspapers in towns and cities had ­become – ­for those who could afford ­it – ­much easier, though smaller scattered townships and rural areas in Scotland still lagged behind. The comparison between newspaper availability in Peterhead, which as we saw received perhaps only five copies of the Aberdeen Journal during winter in the 1790s, and Aberdeen, some 32 miles further south, is striking. When the Athenaeum Literary Lounge (a newsroom) opened in Aberdeen in 1803 (7 a.m. to 9 p.m. seven days a week in summer) it set out to furnish subscribers with twenty-­four newspapers, Scottish (Aberdeen, Dundee, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Greenock) and English (London, Hull, Liverpool) – mercantile interests were clearly catered ­for – a ­ nd a further twenty monthly periodicals, ‘which arrive, per Mail Coach, the Fifth Day of Every Month’ (Edinburgh University: New College. Papers of Alexander Thomson of Banchory [1798–1868]. Prospectus for the opening of the Athenaeum, or New Literary Lounge in Aberdeen, 20 December 1803. MS THO 5(19), ff 36r–38r).

Chapter Thirteen

SCOTTISH PRESS: NEWS TRANSMISSION AND NETWORKS BETWEEN SCOTLAND AND AMERICA IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY Mark G. Spencer

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here is a long-­e stablished and rich historiography exploring the intellectual links between Scotland and America in the eighteenth century. As long ago as 1954, a special issue of the William and Mary Quarterly offered lasting contributions on the topic from scholars as skilful as Bernard Bailyn (1922–2020), John Clive (1924– 90), Dalphy Fagerstrom (1919–77), Jacob Price (1925–2015), Caroline Robbins (1903–99), George Shepperson (1922–2020) and Whitfield J. Bell, Jr (1914–2009). The topic has since been explored in books edited by Richard B. Sher and Jeffrey R. Smitten (1990) and Norman Fiering (1995), among others. More recently, for Roger L. Emerson (2001) and Richard B. Sher (2006), links of print culture joining Scotland and America have been a particular focus. Still, there has yet been little attention directed towards Scottish newspapers in this historiography. Were Scottish newspapers present in eighteenth-­century American news reporting? If so, which ones, when and to what effect? This chapter proposes to add to our understanding of eighteenth-­century news transmission and networks between Scotland and America by providing preliminary answers to those questions.

The Beginnings, 1722–63 In its issue for 5 February 1722 the Boston News-Letter – the first newspaper in America to survive beyond its first ­issue – ­reprinted 313

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more selections from the Edinburgh Evening Courant than from any other source. Scottish-­born editor John Campbell (1653–1728) mined the Courant of 26 June 1721 for seven-­month-­old ‘news’ about Britain but also the Hague, Cadiz and Turin (Boston News-Letter, 5 February 1722). From the Courant of 29 June 1721, the Boston paper provided an account of ‘the Plague in Geneva’ (Boston News-Letter, 5 February 1722). It also quoted long passages from the Scottish paper’s account of the Treaty of Stockholm (1719), Great Britain’s treaty with Sweden following the death of Sweden’s king Charles XII (1682–1718). Reporting on that t­reaty – p ­ art of the conclusion to the Great Northern War (1700–21) – carried into subsequent issues (19, 26 February, 5 March 1722). This coverage was part of a trend in the months to follow. Additional numbers of the Courant provided Boston’s readers with accounts of ‘Inoculating for the Small Pox’ (Boston News-Letter, 26 February 1722), a topic that was on the minds of many B ­ ostonians – ­famously Cotton Mather (1663–1728) and Zabdiel Boylston (1676– 1766) – as an outbreak of the disease infected more than half of the town’s population of 10,600 between April 1721 and February 1722. The Scottish paper also brought news from London, Paris and Vienna (Boston News-Letter, 5 March 1722). Competing papers in colonial Massachusetts in the 1730s drew upon Scottish newspapers in interesting ways too. The Boston Evening Post, for instance, reported on the trial of those responsible for the lynching of Captain John Porteous (c. 1695–1736): Edinburgh, Sept. 6. A very injurious Representation was given in the Caledonia Mercury Yesterday, of what happen’d last Sunday in the old Church. It is there asserted, that when Mr. Cumming began to read the Act of Parliament for bringing to Justice the Murderers of Capt. Porteous, there was great Noise from all Quarters; that even after he address’d them, there was such a Clamour and Roaring, that nothing could be heard; and that some Persons offer’d to throw Stools at him. However, the Boston paper submitted, accepting the testimony of an unidentified source, those in attendance were not as unruly as the Caledonian Mercury reported: The Fact is truly this; when the Congregation was decently and fully met, some People without the Rails, who did not belong to that Audience, and who, it is presum’d, had come there with an Intention to prevent the reading of the Act, and to intimidate the Reader, made a great Noise; but after Provost Usburn [John

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news between scotland and america 315 Osburn] did call to a Town Office, and rose to disperse them, and Mr. Cumming addres’d them, there was no more Noise nor Clamour, and the Act was read out, and heard distinctly by the Congregation, without any Disturbance from them: Nor indeed did any Person there attempt to throw Stools, nor is it practicable, because there are none there. (Boston Evening Post, 6 February 1738)

Scots newspapers of the first half of the eighteenth century brought news of different troubles to American shores as well. On 21 May 1744 it was the Edinburgh Evening Courant that provided the Boston Weekly Post-Boy with the declarations of war between the kings of England and France, in two full pages. Such news was crucial, given Boston’s place in the world. The following summer the same Scottish paper was tapped for news about British troops in North America: We hear that Two Thousand Land-­Forces will be soon sent from hence [London] to Garrison Cape-­Breton; and that they will be formed in Two Regiments, the Commands of which will be, ’tis said given to General PEPPERRELL [Sir William Pepperrell (1696–1759)] and —— SHIRLEY [William Shirley (1694–1771)], Esqrs; It is also talked, That General PEPPERRELL, for his Conduct in the Reduction of Cape-­ Breton, will be created a Baronet of Great-­Britain, and that Commodore WARREN [Peter Warren (1703–52)] will be rewarded with a Flag. (Boston Weekly Post-Boy, 30 September 1745) Troop movements associated with Louisburg were instrumental to colonial Americans, but events in Britain also mattered. The 1745 uprising soon took centre stage. Benjamin Franklin’s (1706–90) Pennsylvania Gazette for 7 January 1746 spoke of little else. An entire ‘SUPPLEMENT’ reprinted a ‘JOURNAL of the Pretender’s Army’, explaining: ‘The following Journal is taken from the Caledonian Mercury, that our Readers may see in what Manner the Rebels have chosen to give an Account of their Atchievements.’ Most of the Boston Weekly News Letter for 16 January 1745 was given to news of the rebellion, here drawn from several sources, some of which were identified, such as ‘The Rebels Account of the Battle, as published in the Caledonian Mercury at Edinburgh, by Authority’. In Philadelphia, Cornelia Smith Bradford’s (d. 1755; she was Andrew Bradford’s widow) American Weekly Mercury reported, from the Edinburgh Evening Courant, on troops and their commanders in Scotland. Americans also learned that ‘The Officers of Excise

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Figure 13.1  Pennsylvania Gazette, 7 January 1746 (Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society)

have been ordered to repair immediately to their Divisions, and do their Duties as formerly’ (American Weekly Mercury, 18 March 1746) and that, on 11 November, ‘a Proclamation was read from the Cross [of Edinburgh], inviting all able-­bodied Men to enter into his Majesty’s Service, with Assurance of a Discharge at the End of six Months, or when the Rebellion shall be extinguished’. Additional news of ‘the Forty-­five’ – including the battle of Culloden (1746) – was scoured by Philadelphia newspapers from other sources, such as letters from participants. The Boston Evening Post reported in November 1746 ‘From the Caledonian Mercury, dated Edinburgh, Sept 9’ on the capture of several rebels and their supporters: We hear Capt. Clanronald is Prisoner on Board the Loo Man of War of 40 Guns, and Miss Florence Macdonald on Board the Eltham, both at Stromness. The Laird of Mackinnon, and the Lady Mackinnon, Lady to the above Mackinnon’s Uncle, Capt. Mackinnon, and Capt. Macleod are on board the Furnace in Leith Road; Mr. Macdonald of Bewesdale, Brother to Clanronald, and the Lady Clanronald, are on board the Hound Sloop. Flora Macdonald (1722–90) would be granted amnesty in 1747. Much later she would herself emigrate to colonial America. But choosing loyalty to the British Crown in another doomed cause, she fled Revolutionary North Carolina, returning to Scotland in 1780. American readers, then, had access to Scottish newspaper accounts of foreign affairs, many of which impacted their world, and they could follow at a distance Scottish events such as the 1745 uprising. But they

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also had reprinted for them material of intellectual interest. This note from the Scots Magazine, for instance, found its way into the Boston Gazette (16 December 1746): June 14 died at Edinburg Mr. Colin Maclaurin [1698–1746], Professor of Mathematicks at the University of Edinburgh FRS. MAP. &c. —From one Observation sent him by the President of the Royal Society made in Peru, by the French Mathematicians and communicated at London by Don Antonie who was taken at Cape Breton, I saw him calculate a few Days before his Death. —That the Earth’s Axis is to the Diameter of its Equatour at 221 to 222, surprisingly near to what Sir Isaac Newton [1643–1727] foretold it would be found. The paper considered that anecdote ‘As great a Proof of the amazing Application of this great Man as of the Truth of the Principles of his learned Friend’. Maclaurin’s calculations had implications for mapping the New World. News delays tended to shrink as the century progressed. Still, one finds hints of just how haphazard transatlantic news transmission remained, even at the eighteenth century’s mid-­point. On 9 July 1750 the Boston Post-Boy prefaced a series of reprinted stories with this line: ‘Last Week Capt. McCunn arrived here from Scotland; and from the Edinburgh Courant of the 10th of May last, we have the following Articles.’ Selected were reports of a violent lightning storm in the south of Holland, diplomatic news from Vienna and Paris, and the following: Rotterdam, May 12. Last Thursday Night arrived in the Texel a Ship from the Dutch Settlement of Surinam, which brought an Account, that a Party of Negroes had revolted against their Masters on the 20th of February last, and had, when the Letters came away, destroyed three or four Plantations, in one of which they had murdered the planter and his Clerk. (Boston Post-Boy, 9 July 1750) Unsurprisingly, this story of slave revolt was of interest in colonies where chattel ­slavery – ­and its ­risks – ­was becoming a larger and larger part of everyday life. Other prejudices surfaced in these sources too, such as when the Boston Evening Post (12 November 1753) saw fit to run as its lead story, from the Glasgow Journal, an antisemitic essay opposed to Britain’s Jewish Naturalisation Act (1753). American newspaper editors were concerned, as we have seen, to verify their news sources and frequently explained precise transmission

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lines to their readers. On 16 October 1758 the New-York Gazette introduced an article on warring Austria and Prussia: ‘From the Edinburgh Courant, of August 3d. Extract of a Letter from a Gentleman at the Hague, to his Friend in London, dated last Tuesday Evening.’ That news titbit concluded with a further explanation: ‘The above Extract was taken from the London Gazette, of July 29th, and brought in a ship from Glasgow, belonging to Messieurs Glassford and Company, just arriv’d in Patowmack River.’ The same story, with minor variations, was printed on the same day in the New-York Mercury. Other Scottish papers, such as the Aberdeen Journal, were sources of American information about the British army’s movements in Europe and America. In one instance the New-York Journal (13 August 1764) relied on the Aberdeen paper for its account of a review of Napier’s Regiment, which had fought ‘valiantly’ in both the War of the Austrian Succession (1740–48) and in the Seven Years War (1756–63), especially at the battle of Minden (1759). Both the Boston Post-Boy (3 August 1761) and the New-York Mercury (14 September 1761) ­reproduced – ­from the Scots Magazine – the trial of several officers of the light dragoons, ‘quartered at Haddington, Musselburgh, &c’ for ‘violently attacking’ Peter Ker, ‘toll-­gatherer at Ravenshaugh’. But all-­in-­all, colonial American newspapers cited the Edinburgh Evening Courant more than any other Scottish newspaper. To the examples cited above might be added issues of the Boston Evening Post (26 November 1759), the New-York Mercury (14 July 1760) and others. A particularly interesting piece of agricultural news came from the Scots Magazine. ‘An account of a REAPING-­MACHINE, invented by Mr. Peter Williamson’ was reprinted by the Boston Post-Boy (6 December 1762), the Providence Gazette (11 December 1762) and the Boston News-Letter (23 December 1762). It comprised Williamson’s letter ‘to the Honourable society for the encouragement of arts, sciences, &c.’, describing his machine and the promising results of experiments with it in Edinburgh. ‘Many gentlemen of distinction, and several knowing farmers’ were convinced ‘that this invention is a valuable improvement in husbandry’. In Boston, readers were even invited to drop by to see what it looked like: ‘A Cut of this curious Reaping Machine, may be seen at [John] Green [1727–87] and [Joseph] Russel’s [1734–95] Printing-Office’. American newspapermen did not say whether they or their readers were aware of additional aspects of Peter Williamson’s (1730–99) eventful life. ‘Indian Peter’, as he became known, was a Scottish crofter’s son. Kidnapped as a child in Aberdeen, he was sold into servitude in Pennsylvania. Securing his freedom and marrying well, in 1754 he

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Figure 13.2  Green and Russell’s Boston Post-Boy & Advertiser, 6 December 1762 (Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society)

was again ­captured – ­on his frontier plantation by C ­ herokees – w ­ ho also killed his wife. Seeking revenge, Williamson joined the British army to fight in the French and Indian War (1754–63). Captured by the French, he was taken prisoner to Quebec. Freed in a prisoner exchange, in 1758 Williamson made his way back to Scotland where he dressed as an Native American for show and wrote an account of his travels.

Revolutionary America, 1764–83 Historians often date the beginning of Revolutionary America to the ending of the French and Indian War and the imperial crisis that accompanied the aftermath of the Treaty of Paris (1763). Scottish papers in that period contained discussions of resistance to laws considered unfair by some, themes of civil unrest, and state maintenance of law and order. Some of those made it to America. The New-York Mercury quoted the Edinburgh Courant regarding ‘a spirit of sedition and tumult prevailing among many wicked persons’ in an Edinburgh mob who complained about ‘the late accidental scarcity of Lothian meal’. That, despite the ‘great pains’ taken by ‘the magistrates of [that] city’ to supply the market, ‘their endeavours have been attended already with considerable success and proper provision is making for the future’. The Scottish paper reprinted a letter from one of the disgruntled. He threatened ‘any Bailie’ who ‘examined any person of persons’ who had been a part of those demonstrations: ‘depend upon it, they shall suffer both in person and effects, by a company of people, too extensive to enumerate’. The paper reported: ‘Magistrates have offered a reward of 40 l. sterling for discovering the author’ (New-York Mercury, 26 March 1764). The piece was reprinted

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in Connecticut and Rhode Island (Connecticut Gazette, 6 April 1764; Providence Gazette, 11 August 1764), colonial centres of resistance to the Sugar Act (1764). Meanwhile, other American papers, such as the Massachusetts Gazette, reprinted Edinburgh Courant reporting on the Court of the Exchequer trials related to the illegal importing of tea (13 September 1764). Tensions were building within Britain’s empire; Scottish newspaper reporting provided context for American troubles. But not all was doom and gloom. Readers of American newspapers in the 1760s also saw advantageous dimensions of the colonial relationship illuminated by reprintings from Scottish newspapers. From the Edinburgh Courant, the New-York Mercury reported: ‘On Thursday se’ennight, the annual gold medal, given by Dr. Hope, for promoting the Study of botany, was adjudged to Samuel Bard, Esq [1742–1821]; of New York, student of medicine in the University of Edinburgh’ (New York Mercury, 6 August 1764). The story explained, ‘This is the second medal given’; the previous year’s recipient was ‘Arthur Lee, Esq [1740–92]; of Virginia, student of medicine in the University of Edinburgh’. ‘Dr. Hope’ was Professor John Hope (1725–86), a renowned botanist of the Scottish Enlightenment. By 1764, as well as being Professor of Botany at the University of Edinburgh, he had been appointed Keeper of the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh and King’s Botanist. Professor Hope figured in related ways in other publications. An article of particular interest for American newspapers was the Edinburgh Evening Courant’s ‘PROPOSALS for an ANNUAL IMPORTATION of AMERICAN SEEDS into SCOTLAND’. Its first American reprinting seems to have been in the New-York Gazette (3 September 1764): YOU will please give a place in your news-­paper, to the inclosed proposals; in consequence of it, there has been a numerous meeting of gentlemen in town, who have agreed, that Dr. Hope, Professor of Botany in the University, shall give the commissions for the seeds, receive the money just now, and give advertisement where the seeds are to be delivered when they come home. This ‘public spirited’ undertaking aimed to further ‘A TASTE for the propagation of American plants, particularly trees’ that had ‘of late diffused itself very much in this country’. American readers learned that Scottish readers saw this connection as one that ‘deserved to be encouraged’. American plants ‘may prove the means of making considerable improvements in this kingdom’. What was wanted was a more systematic effort:

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news between scotland and america 321 But this taste labours under great discouragements at present. In the first place, the skill and fidelity of the savers and collectors of these seeds in America are uncertain; in the next place, the integrity of the seedmen in Britain is not always to be trusted; who, from the expence they are at in procuring these seeds, are often tempted, if any of them remain on hand over year, to dispose of them as fresh seeds. And though nothing were to be feared in either these respects, yet, after all, there is commonly little choice in the assortments sent over at random, and a man of curiosity is often disappointed in his enquiries after the seeds he wants.   To remedy these inconveniences deserves the attention of all who wish well to planting, gardening, or agriculture. And as our new acquisitions in America promise us a large accession of plants to our former collections, and of plants too, to which the climate of Britain will be particularly suited.

The proposal laid out how, commencing in 1764, American seeds would be imported into Scotland, ‘the subscription sum being two guineas each person’; that ‘a Botanical Catalogue, with the provincial names, shall be made up, with the greatest care, of American, and particularly Canadian plants and trees, which can be supported to thrive in open air in Britain’; and that correspondents with ‘skill in botany’ would be sought in ‘the colonies of New-­England, New-­York, or Pennsylvania, &c’. Scots subscribers would receive their seeds ‘properly saved and imported in due time’, being ‘furnished with what lots of these seeds they want, at prime cost, as value for part of their subscriptions’. ‘By these means’, the proposal concluded: there would be a regular and annual importation of seeds, so that if through the accidents of seasons the seeds of one year should misgive, the planter would be sure of a supply the next year; and the person employed in America, would find it worth while to be at pains in collecting these seeds, and transmitting them safe, and in a vegetating state to Britain. Readers in Boston were delivered Dr Hope’s ‘Proposal’ – as printed in the Edinburgh Evening Courant – by way of ‘the Schooner Poppet, Capt. Thomas Davis, from the Orkneys, in 8 Weeks’ (Boston Evening Post, 17 September 1764). The entire story was also reprinted in Rhode Island (Providence Gazette, 22 September 1764). Dr Hope’s American seed proposal was linked to the Edinburgh Society for the Importation of Foreign Seeds and Plants, an initiative that found some prominent

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Figure 13.3  Boston Evening Post, 17 September 1764 (Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society)

American supporters (Emerson 1982). And even colonial Americans unaware of that broader context could have gathered from their newspaper reading a sense that their world was a part of improvements wrought by Scotland’s Enlightenment. For this set, an American Revolution would threaten to destroy intellectual bonds along with political ones.

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As news of the Stamp Act (1765), and resistance to it, resonated throughout colonial America, the contents of Scotland’s newspapers were well-­enough known to provide fodder for sarcasm: We heard that in a late Importation from Scotland, were a great Quantity of Types, and other Materials for the Printing Business, and that the Proprietors intend to publish soon a Caledonian Mercury; as they already give out the present News-­Papers in Boston are but sorry Performances . . . But one Englishman is engag’d to assist them in Spelling, and supplying them with Dissertations, particularly Physic, Astronomy, Agriculture, and Tavern keeping. ‘Under Agriculture’, jested the Boston Gazette, ‘will be mentioned the sowing and gathering of Oats and Barley; and under Tavern-­keeping, will be an excellent Piece on the Effects of White Rum upon Foreigners’ (23 September 1765). As the 1760s drew to a close, Scottish news continued to flow into America from papers published in Edinburgh, Glasgow and Aberdeen. One of the earliest American references to the Edinburgh Advertiser shows that news from competing Scottish papers was sometimes compared. The New-York Gazette reported: ‘It was the Edinburgh Courant of last Week that gave us the Account of the Death of the Duke of Hamilton; but the Edinburgh Advertiser, published on Friday last, says he was much better’ (4 September 1769). The Courant had it right; the short-­lived James George Hamilton, 7th Duke of Hamilton, born 1755, had died on 7 July 1769. Still, the Edinburgh Advertiser would become something of a favourite with American newspaper editors. John Carter’s (1745–1814) Providence Gazette (28 October 1769), for instance, reprinted from it an essay by ‘Impartialis’. This ‘friend of America’ had written to the Advertiser to support Americans in their resistance to the Townshend Duties (1767) which had applied duties to enumerate items such as glass and paper. ‘I wave all enquiry into the question of the right of taxation’, wrote ‘Impartialis’, as that was Parliament’s prerogative. But, ‘I think it plainly appears, that our [Scottish] wealth and strength go hand in hand with the exportation of our manufactures; and the present scheme of laying a tax on glass and paper [in America], will surely throw a damp upon the state of those manufactures.’ Moreover, implored the Scottish writer, ‘Let us put ourselves’ in an American’s position, ‘and then judge’. Less politically charged items were also extracted from the Edinburgh Advertiser – such as the Providence Gazette’s ‘Method for recovering drowned Persons’ (29 December

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1770), or miscellany such as that in the New-York Journal (3 September 1772). News of John Wilkes (1725–97) and the ‘Wilkes and Liberty’ riots in London (1768) were sometimes passed to American readers via Scottish newspapers, such as the Glasgow Journal (Providence Gazette, 30 July 1763) and the Edinburgh Evening Courant (Massachusetts Gazette, 28 July 1768; Boston Evening Post, 1 August 1768; NewYork Journal, 4 August 1768; New-York Gazette, 8 August 1768). Occasionally, too, Scottish newspapers were conduits for American information about European Enlightenment figures. That was the case when the Pennsylvania Evening Post reprinted from the Edinburgh Evening Courant an anecdote about Voltaire (1694–1778), furnishing ‘a record of the age and wonderful spirit of this inexhaustible writer’ (26 January 1775). In Connecticut, the Norwich Packet reprinted the same piece (16 February 1775). As imperial crisis erupted into open warfare, Americans relied on British newspapers, including Scottish ones, for their reporting of the theatre of war. They sometimes compared accounts, weighing one against another, to determine what was fake news. ‘The Edinburgh Courant, received yesterday’, reported the New-York Gazette, contradicts the account in the Edinburgh Advertiser, mentioning Sir William Erskine’s [1728–95] being taken by an American Privateer, with the money of the 71st regiment, and says, it is without all foundation, as he sailed on board the Ocean, a ship of 18 carriage guns, and proceeds entirely upon the supposition of his having been on board the Venus, Capt. Wilson, which, with the Crawford, Capt. McLean [Maclean], was taken and carried into Boston: On board the first was Capt. Fraser’s [Simon Fraser] company, and Capt. M’Leod [Norman M’Leod] with his company on board the other. Upon their arrival off Cape Ann, they were attacked by four privateers, whom they fought a considerable time, and obliged them to sheer off. They went into Nantasket Road, in expectation of finding the men of war there, but, in place thereof, were surrounded by a great number of armed schooners, who, with the assistance of the privateers formerly beat off, carried them into Boson. (2 December 1776) Before the end of the year the same story was reprinted in the Boston Gazette (23 December 1776). As the interruptions of war intensified, fewer Scottish newspapers made their way to American shores; but some did. The Caledonian

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Mercury’s printing of a supposed letter from Benjamin Franklin to Samuel Adams (1722–1803) garnered attention. It was reprinted in the Continental Journal, and Weekly Advertiser with this heading: ‘The following fictitious (ministerial) Letter was taken from the Caledonian Mercury, of March 30, 1778’ (30 July 1778). So, too, did its printing of a letter from ‘Lucius’ to Sir William Howe (1729–1814); it was reprinted in the Pennsylvania Packet, or The General Advertiser (12 June 1779). Another letter from ‘F.D.’ to the Printer of the Edinburgh Advisor had been critical of Howe, and was republished in Boston by John Gill (1732–85) in the Continental Journal, and Weekly Advertiser (13 May 1779). America’s loyalist press reprinted items from Scottish newspapers, too, as when James Rivington’s (1724–1802) New York Royal Gazette (19 October 1782) reprinted Lord Shelburne’s (1737–1805) ‘Speech against American Independence’ as it had been printed in the Glasgow Journal. Scots humour did not go unnoticed by American newspaper publishers; even during war they remained eager to reprint it for their audiences. The Edinburgh Advertiser provided the Independent Ledger with a satirical letter attacking the British Privy Council, the House of Lords, the House of Commons, the British ‘people in general’ (as well as ‘the female part’ and ‘the male part’ in particular), the Army and Navy, ‘the Law’ and ‘the professors of Religion’. All done with the aim to bring about ‘A peace with the Americans’ (18 March 1782). In a like spirit, the Pennsylvania Packet (8 June 1782) reprinted ‘From the CALEDONIAN MERCURY’: INTELLIGENCE EXTRAORDINARY. THE copartnery, well known by the firm of John Bull and co. having of late suffered heavy losses, whilst under the direction of John Bull, esquire the acting partner; this serves to inform the public, that said copartnery is dissolved with mutual consent. The remainder of the stock is invested in trustees, for behoof of creditors; and Sister Peg, late one of the unfortunate partners, takes this opportunity of informing the public, that she has resumed the trade of her fathers, and hopes to have the countenance of the friends of the family, at home and abroad. Thistle-­Field, Nov. 9, 1781. The American newspaper’s next item, signed ‘CANDOUR’, was said to be ‘From the Same’: SCANDALOUS CHRONICLE. It is whispered round the very politest circles, that Margaret, otherwise know[n] by the title of Sister Peg, intends to have her brother Bull, esquire, cognosced

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for an idiot, and to take upon herself, as nearest of kin, the administration of his estate, before the unhappy man casts it all away at the cocks.---Witness me, at Edinburgh, this 10th November 1781. Within the month, both pieces were reprinted in the Providence Gazette (22 June 1782).

The Early Republic, 1784–89 The American Revolutionary War behind them, Americans of the new Republic continued to draw upon Scottish newspapers, but with shifting purposes. The formation of a national character was now of heightened concern. When the Independent Ledger (19 January 1784) reprinted an essay from the Evening Courant, it was the ‘manliness and honor’ of the Scottish national character that was on display. The theme of ‘virtue’, a central pillar of America’s republican experiment, occupied others. A widely circulated article from the Scots Magazine reprinted the last wishes of a certain young female who was ‘penitent’ on her death, having led a secret life as a prostitute (Independent Journal, 8 September 1784; Pennsylvania Packet, 14 September 1784; Spooner’s Vermont Journal, 27 October 1784). Booksellers of the young United States of America included Scottish newspapers among their wares, as had their colonial peers. In 1788 Scots-­born Samuel Campbell (1765–1836) advertised the Scots Magazine for sale in the New-York Journal in much the same way as Irish-­born Hugh Gaine (1726–1807) had earlier, in the New-York Gazette (27 January 1772). Campbell had carted his stock of the Scots Magazine to New York from Glasgow onboard the Jeane (New-York Journal, 29 January, 3 March, 7 March, 9 April 1788). Others, such as Philadelphia’s Robert Campbell (1769–1800), even accepted American subscriptions for the Scottish paper in 1789 (Pennsylvania Packet, 29 September). Americans of the 1780s were enthralled to read of their republican political experiment in the pages of Scottish newspapers, and when they came upon such discussions they not infrequently reprinted them. In its issue for 26 February 1784, for instance, the Virginia Journal and Alexandria Advertiser reprinted, from the Edinburgh Advertiser, the pro-­American ‘An Account of the BEHAVIOUR and SENTIMENTS of DEMOCRITUS’. Other ­accounts – ­ones less glowing in their assessments of American political ­affairs – ­were also reprinted, sometimes with additional editorial comment.

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The Charleston Evening Gazette for 25 October 1785 reprinted an ‘Extract of a letter from a gentleman in Charleston (South Carolina), dated Feb. 25, 1785’ from the Edinburgh Advertiser of 4 July 1784. The unidentified correspondent painted a bleak picture of South Carolina’s balance of trade, a situation in which ‘the complaints of creditors for want of payment, and of debtors for being pushed, are universal’. Such items were part of a larger war of words. The Columbian Herald (10 March 1785) offered its readers a letter ‘To the Printer’ said to be ‘From the Edinburgh Courant’. There, ‘VERITATIS AMICUS’ recited what he took to be the ­standard – b ­ ut m ­ istaken – ­British understanding of the ‘most miserable state’ of Americans in their new Republic. They were said to be ‘destitute of government and laws, without credit and without money, having lost every thing that can make life agreeable, by acquiring liberty and independence’. The correspondent challenged these ‘false and fabricated’ accounts which, ‘swallowed by the vulgar’, had no truth in fact. Of course, American readers were themselves divided about the direction their new Republic was heading, as Shays’ Rebellion (1787) soon demonstrated all too clearly. One of the most widely reprinted of all eighteenth-­century Scottish newspaper articles was a 1785 excerpt from the Edinburgh Courant, intended to ‘give some idea how fortunes are made in India’. It quoted ‘Part of a letter from the Nabob of arcott [Muhammad Ali Khan Wallajah (1717–95)] to the Directors of India Company’. The excerpt documented, in ‘a translation of an Arzee, from the Killadar of Vellore’, some of the ‘miseries brought on this devoted country, and the wretched inhabitants, by the oppressive hand of Lord Macartney’s management’. George Macartney (1st Earl Macartney, 1737–1806) and his collectors, overly zealous in their collection of revenues, were said to have ‘imprisoned the wives and children of the inhabitants, seized the few jewels they had, and, before the face of their husbands, flogged them, in order to make them produce other jewels, &c’. The article was ubiquitously reprinted (Pennsylvania Evening Herald, 3 December 1785; Independent Gazetteer, 3 December 1785; Virginia Journal and Alexandria Advertiser, 15 December 1785; The Continental Journal, 16 December 1785; Independent Ledger, 19 December 1785; American Recorder, 20 December 1785; Plymouth Journal, 27 December 1785; Middlesex Gazette, 27 December 1785; Charleston Evening Gazette, 28 December 1785; Connecticut Gazette, 5 January 1786; Providence Gazette, 21 January 1786). American independence, with all of its challenges, looked good in comparison. Independent America was sometimes openly celebrated by the Scottish press in pieces that circulated in the United States. That

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was the case for a correspondent to the Edinburgh Evening Courant. ‘In 1763’, wrote ‘Theophastus’ – in an essay reprinted in the SouthCarolina Weekly Gazette (17 December 1785) – ‘the British empire was great, powerful, and extensive, and harmony reigned through all its branches. In 1783, the empire is dismembered, – America, by a successful rebellion, is independent, and inimical to Britain.’ Scotland’s general interest stories continued to recirculate within an expanding American periodical world. A poem from the Glasgow Mercury on ‘The AIR BALLOON’ made the rounds in America (Independent Gazetteer, 17 April 1784; Political Intelligencer, 27 April 1784; Pennsylvania Packet, 12 June 1784; New-York Packet, 5 July 1784). Vicenzo Lunardi’s (1754–1806) 110-­mile hot-­air balloon flight from Glasgow provided even more sensational news, and the Charleston Morning Post (27 April 1786) reprinted ‘Lunardi’s Account of his Voyage’ from the Edinburgh Courant. The Courant was the source of other amusements, such as poems (Charleston Herald, 3 March 1785) and, in the Columbian Herald, this noteworthy piece with a Charleston focus: One may judge of the liberality of sentiments that pervade some part of America, from the manly resentment in the last resolutions from Charleston, by which they condemn Dr. Adam Ferguson’s [1723–1816] history of Civil Society to be burned by the hands of the common hangman, because he had been guilty of the horrid crime of going out as Secretary to the Commissioners for settling peace with the colonies! They surely will never again think of reading a book which has undergone so many editions after being thus condemned to the flames, for the sin of the author, twelve years after it was published. We shall probably hear of this celebrated author’s Roman History, and Institutes of Moral Philosophy, condemned by the same righteous judgment, to a similar fate. (31 January 1785) This piece circulated elsewhere, including in the Pennsylvania Packet (25 February 1785). In 1778 Ferguson had joined the Carlisle Peace Commission, a widely reported but unsuccessful effort to end the War for American Independence. What did American readers make of the Edinburgh Courant’s account? No record survives to tell us. There are other unsolved mysteries in these sources. On 6 and 10 July 1786, the State Gazette of South-Carolina printed this ‘NOTICE’: If any person in this city has in his possession two Edinburgh Newspapers, (known by the name of the Caledonian Mercury)

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news between scotland and america 329 bearing date the 18th and 23d of August, 1784, and will be so good as to lodge them with the Printer of this paper for the space of 24 hours, shall receive Two Dollars, and the papers returned if required.

The Gazette was then published by Ann Timothy (c. 1727–92), following the death of her husband, Peter (d. 1782). What was her interest in those precise issues? Did any readers come forward? If so, to what purpose were the Scottish newspapers put? We do not know. Still, knowing that widow Timothy was hopeful that some among her reading audience would happen to have on hand two particular issues of the Caledonian Mercury – published more than two years e­ arlier – i­s telling of the wider story that this chapter is uncovering of the popularity of Scottish newspapers in eighteenth-­century America. Perhaps the South Carolina paper was interested in the details of premiums for linen production that were being published by the Caledonian Mercury in those years. Other American newspapers were. The Independent Gazetteer wrote about them under the column ‘Dublin’: By a late Caledonian Mercury, we find a number of premiums offered by the Trustees of the Lien-­Hall, at Edinburgh, for the manufacture of linens of various degrees of fineness, and for damask, linen, muslins, cottons and lawns. They also offer premiums for the best hunters cloth, dressed cloth, Kendal coatings, flannels in imitation of the Welsh kind, felt hats, and designs for diapers. ‘It is true’, explained the Irish writer: those premiums are not on so magnificent or extensive a scale as those held out in this kingdom, but, to every one acquainted with that wise frugality which pervades every measure in Scotland, it must be very obvious how powerfully a little money will operate, to make them indefatigable in the pursuit of a national advantage.—In regard to the lawn, kenting, gauzes, and cambrick trade, it is well known they drain this kingdom of thousands yearly, without any attempt on our side (excepting that of the Dundalk Manufactory) to establish similar manufactures of our own. (19 June 1784) Philadelphia’s Pennsylvania Packet ran the same story (24 June 1784). In the late 1780s and early 1790s one finds stories from Glasgow newspapers, such as the Glasgow Mercury (Charleston Morning Post,

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7 June 1786; Pennsylvania Packet, 14 July 1787), but it was the Glasgow Advertiser that was the most frequently referenced of Scotland’s newspapers in American newspapers for those years. For many it was the Glasgow Advertiser’s version of ‘an animal called KRAKEN’ that was thought entertaining. This fish-­like creature ‘from the Greenland Seas’ made sensational reading. Its ‘tail reached to the North Pole, and, by beating it about, raised the nitrous cloud which causes the Aurora Borealis’, reported New York’s Independent Journal (14 March 1787). The American Mercury (26 March 1787), the Newport Mercury (26 March 1787), the Salem Mercury (31 March 1787) and the New-Haven Gazette (5 April 1787) all followed suit. Another anecdotal story of 1787 entitled ‘SINGULAR ANTIPATHY’ from the Glasgow Advertiser (15 October) circulated just as widely. It gave an account of John Poole, a teenage boy from Suffolk who, as Francis Bailey’s (1744–1817) Freeman’s Journal (23 January 1788) put it, ‘discovered a strong antipathy to the sight of money’. Any time coins or silver were introduced to him, he went into convulsions, so much so that it was feared he would die. The boy’s father ‘naturally feels concerned, on reflecting that in the progress of time his son must be engaged in business, and of course in money transactions’. Perhaps rapidly commercialising societies, such as Scotland’s and America’s were in the 1780s, found particular intrigue in such a tale. When ‘Singular Antipathy’ ran in the Independent Journal (30 January 1788) it shared pages with Publius’ ‘Federalist Essays’ Nos. XLV and XLVI. It was reprinted frequently over the next six months, including in the Pennsylvania Packet (28 Jan. 1788), Middlesex Gazette (4 February 1788), Connecticut Journal (6 February 1788), Massachusetts Gazette (9 February 1788), American Herald (18 February 1788), Newport Mercury (25 February 1788), New-Jersey Journal (12 March 1788) and New-York Journal (7 May 1788). Reprintings continued through the end of the century (Centinel of Liberty, 1 October 1799; Times and District of Columbia Daily Advertiser, 7 October 1799). For other papers, such as the New-York Packet, it was the Edinburgh Advertiser’s account of the ‘Comte de Vergennes [Charles Gravier, 1719–87], present Prime Minister of France’ that warranted repeating (19 January 1787). But the most widely reprinted Scottish newspaper item in 1780s America was the Caledonian Mercury’s praise of American oratory. As the Federal Gazette put it: A writer in a late Caledonian Mercury, respecting the proceedings of the convention of the commonwealth of Massachusetts, convened for the purpose of assenting to and ratifying the

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news between scotland and america 331 constitution recommended by the grand federal convention of the United States of America, thus observes: ‘Some of the speeches are very ingenious, and of considerable length; and most of the speakers appear to have been well informed, and to have duly considered the subjects they speak upon. In point of oratory or elocution, they are rather behind our gentlemen of St. Stephen’s chapel; but, as men of business, and speaking of a subject they thoroughly understand, they are really more worthy of attention than the flowery speechifiers on this side of the water.’ (11 December 1788)

Similar versions appeared in Pennsylvania (Pennsylvania Mercury, 11 December 1788; Pennsylvania Packet, 11 December 1788; Independent Gazetteer, 12 December 1788), New York (Daily Advertiser, 17 December 1788; New-York Journal and Patriotic Register, 18 December 1788) and Massachusetts (Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy, 25 December 1788; Boston Gazette, 5 January 1789).

The Close of the Eighteenth Century, 1790–99 In the final years of the eighteenth century American newspapers continued to comb Scotland’s papers for a variety of anecdotes and interesting miscellany (Federal Gazette, 1 June 1791; New-Jersey Journal, 1 June 1791; Columbian Centinel, 4 June 1791; The Phenix, Or, Windham Herald, 11 June 1791; Burlington Advertiser, 19 July 1791; Concord Herald, 20 July 1791; The Diary, 25 Sept. 1792; State Gazette of SouthCarolina, 29 October 1793; New-Hampshire Gazette, 5 November 1793; The Mirror, 11 November 1793). Some dealt with American t­ opics – ­such as reprinting from the newspaper-­like Edinburgh Magazine, or Literary Miscellany the recently deceased Benjamin Franklin’s humorous epitaph (Burlington Advertiser, 11 May 1790; Pennsylvania Packet, 12 June 1790; City Gazette, 21 August 1790). Other representative items include Osborne’s New-Hampshire Spy reprinting from the Caledonian Mercury the poem ‘On the death of Mr. [John] Howard [1726–90]’ (21 July 1790) about the British prison reformer. Boston’s Federal Orrery reported from the same paper that ‘in consequence of the skill and perseverance of a mr. Weir, Edinburgh is now, for the first time, adorned and enriched with a considerable collection of natural objects’ (11 June 1795). The reference was to Alexander Weir’s (b. 1735) Museum of Natural Curiosities. At times it was false news that circulated. This was the case when the Caledonian Mercury reported in 1792 that ‘the Empress of Russia

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is dead’ (Daily Advertiser, 16 July 1792; Dunlap’s American Daily Advertiser, 18 July 1792; Baltimore Evening Post, 19 July 1792). Catherine the Great’s reign as empress had begun in 1762 and ended with her death in 1796, not 1792. Occasionally, too, errors were made in Scottish papers about American affairs, and when they occurred, American publishers brought them to the attention of their readers. So, for instance, the Philadelphia Gazette reported on 23 December 1795: The following malicious tale is copied from the Edinburgh Evening Courant, of the 8th of August last. ‘In June last, several persons were tried at Philadelphia, before the Supreme Court, for high treason, in being concerned in the late insurrections against the government of the United States of America, found guilty, and executed’. Philadelphia’s readers did not need to be told that the Whiskey Rebellion (1791–94) had been quashed without any rebels being executed. When Scottish newspapers of the 1790s discussed the Atlantic slave trade, those voices too were broadcast in America. Dunlap’s American Daily Advertiser (9 June 1792), for instance, reprinted abolitionist verse from the Glasgow Advertiser. The next week, it reprinted Philanthropos’s contribution to the Advertiser, writing, in part, ‘If the slave trade be not abolished, I tremble at the consequences’ (16 June 1792; reprinted Connecticut Gazette, 5 July 1792; United States Chronicle, 12 July 1792). For the Columbian Centinel of 6 December 1794, an issue of the Edinburgh Evening Courant provided copytext for several stories. It reproduced accounts of Ernst Frederick von Walterstorffe (1755–1801), Governor-­General of the Danish West Indies; English woollen manufacturing; educational initiatives of ‘The Society for the propagation of Christian Knowledge in the Highlands of Scotland’; and news that The President of the United States of America [George Washington] has lately transmitted to the Earl of Buchan, by the American Minister at London, a diploma from the Philosophical Society at Philadelphia for promoting useful knowledge, creating his Lordship a member of that community; and at the same time another, at his request, to Dr. ANDERSON, of the Mounie, in Aberdeenshire, for his successful zeal in promoting the study of agriculture, and the dissemination of useful knowledge. (see also New-York Daily Gazette, 18 December 1794)

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Figure 13.4  Benjamin Franklin by Alexandre Tardieu (Creative Commons Licence, courtesy of Wikimedia)

These and other newspaper reports of the 1790s remind us that many of the intellectual links joining Scotland and America survived the disruptions of American independence. George Washington (1732–99) was a regular correspondent with his distant relation, the 11th Earl of Buchan, David Steuart Erskine (1742–1829). Furthermore, the earl’s friendship with Benjamin Franklin dated from at least 1759, when they met in Britain, and the two corresponded before, during and after the War for American Independence. Franklin and Washington were both counted among the correspondents of Scottish agriculturalist Dr James Anderson (1739–1808). Himself a regular contributor to Scottish newspapers, from 1790 Anderson edited his own periodical, the Bee; or Universal Literary Intelligencer. Its ‘Proposal’ ran in American newspapers (New-York Gazette, 1 December, 10 December 1790; see also Gazette of the United States, 5 January 1791; United States Chronicle, 24 February 1791) and subscriptions were taken by Samuel Campbell, New York; Robert Campbell, Philadelphia; William Price Young (1760–1820), Charleston; Isaiah Thomas (1749–1831),

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Figure 13.5  Dr James Anderson (Creative Commons Licence, courtesy of Wikimedia)

Worcester; and Benjamin Guild (1749–92), Boston. Anderson personally posted copies to Washington in Virginia. As the century came to a close, British political events continued to be of interest to American readers, such as when in 1792 The Diary reprinted ‘From a Glasgow paper of July 31’ the resolves of the Society formed in Glasgow for the purpose of ‘effecting a Constitutional and Parliamentary Reform’ at a meeting held at the Prince of Wales Tavern (Diary, 12 September). The same paper carried under the title ‘Tippo’s Sons’ an English account of Tipu Sultan’s (1750–99) two boys at the time of the Treaty of Seringapatam (1792). For the NewYork Gazette it was the Caledonian Mercury’s discussion of William Cobbett’s (1763–1835) Philadelphia-­published Porcupine’s Gazette that warranted reprinting (30 October 1798). The American Minerva (9 April 1796), the Daily Advertiser (9 April 1796), Greenleaf ’s NewYork Journal (12 April 1796) and the Jersey Chronicle (23 April 1796) all reprinted the Glasgow Advertiser’s account of Scottish diplomat Sir Robert Liston (1742–1836).

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Dunlap’s American Daily Advertiser reprinted the Glasgow Advertiser’s account of the resolves of the farmers of Ochiltree, in East Ayrshire. There, James Reid and Patrick Simpson signed a document arguing for political reform and a ‘remedy of abuses’, but pledging ‘loyalty and obedience’ (29 April 1793). This item also found its way into the State Gazette of South-Carolina (17 May 1793), then published by Benjamin Franklin Timothy (1771–1807), who carried on the paper of his mother, Ann Timothy. Days after reprinting the Ochiltree farmers’ resolves, Dunlap’s American Daily Advertiser reprinted, again from the Glasgow Advertiser, the Reform Friendly Society’s ‘Declaration’ against war, signed by society executives Allen Carmichael and Charles Lang (7 May 1793; reprinted in The Diary, 9 May 1793; American Apollo, 17 May 1793; Virginia Chronicle, 18 May 1793; Essex Journal, 22 May 1793; City Gazette, 24 May 1793). News of the Irish Rebellion of 1798 quickly reached American shores, too; the Caledonian Mercury was a frequently cited source for information about it. Other items, equally political, contained lessons that American reprinters reasoned were directly relevant to the United States. This was true of the most widely reprinted article of all in these years. In a set of letters to the Caledonian Mercury, ‘Viator’, or the traveller, provided a history of Scotland’s roads in an article printed under the title ‘On Turnpike Roads’. The author argued against the ‘prejudices’ that continued to ‘prevail against the erection of turnpikes’, even ‘among a numerous set of people, who are in general possessed of quick parts, and sound understanding’. A ­ mericans – t­ hemselves in the midst of a transportation and commercial ­revolution – ­could look to eighteenth-­century Scotland’s example of improved roads and commerce for a model. ‘From the facts’, wrote Viator, ‘it is clearly demonstrated, that turnpikes are the greatest blessing that can be conferred on a country; and that instead of proving burdensome, either to the inhabitants of a town or the country, they are, in the highest degree, beneficial to both.’ So, ‘He that hath ears to hear let him observe; and if these facts do not convince his understanding, let him continue to be an object of derision by every man of common sense.’ Over the next decade, American readers came upon Viator’s history lesson in newspapers published in state after state (Dunlap’s American Daily Advertiser, 3 December 1791; Carlisle Gazette, 25 January 1792; Thomas’s Massachusetts Spy, 22 Mach. 1792; Connecticut Gazette, 29 March 1792; Claypoole’s American Daily Advertiser, 12 December 1797; Federal Gazette, 22 December 1797). As ‘A Landholder’ put it in a Rhode Island reprinting, ‘The following well-­written observations, on

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the subject of TURNPIKE ROADS (from the Edinburgh Caledonian Mercury) it is presumed will apply to other countries besides Scotland. By giving them a place in your useful paper, you will serve the public at large’ (Providence Gazette, 2 December 1797). In the final years of the eighteenth century an element of historiography enters our story. In 1794 the Scottish antiquarian George Chalmers (1742–1825) published his biography of Thomas Ruddiman (1674–1757), ‘The Keeper, for almost Fifty Years, of the Library belonging to the Faculty of Advocates of Edinburgh’. A short column entitled ‘News-­papers’ (Mohawk Mercury, 14 February 1797; Rutland Herald, 20 February 1797; Spooner’s Vermont Journal, 24 February 1797; Middlesex Gazette, 3 March 1797) cited Chalmers’ book, along with works by other Scots, such as Adam Anderson’s (1693–1765) Historical Deduction of the Origin of Commerce (1762, reprinted in an expanded edition in 1787). Americans now had a concise history of Scottish ­newspapers – ­those vehicles for the ‘increased dissemination of knowledge’ – from which they had drawn so regularly over the course of the century. This chapter has endeavoured to show some of what was absorbed when they did so.

Case Study 12: ‘Farewell to the Highlands’: Or, How Broadsides Helped Create Images of the Scottish Diaspora Marina Dossena The role of popular culture in the creation and reinforcement of myths is indisputable; for example, Donaldson (1988) and Pittock (2009), among others, have drawn attention to the numerous ways in which the Jacobite uprising of 1745 has been represented and actually reinvented thanks both to literary creations, such as Walter Scott’s immensely successful novels, and the appearance of songs, many of which were in fact written in the nineteenth century, long after the events to which they referred, but which gave those events an aura of nostalgic heroism. In addition, those compositions, whether literary or musical, often presented the figure of the exiled Jacobite in terms that contributed to the creation of an idealised image of the Scot abroad. Indeed, Charles Edward Stuart himself was depicted as the epitome of this condition in what has probably become the best-­known composition of all, ‘The Skye Boat Song’. The popularity of this song is such that its lyrics have been rewritten twice: once in the nineteenth century by Robert Louis Stevenson, and again in the twenty-­first century by Bear McCreary, who adapted Stevenson’s lyrics for the title music of the TV series Outlander (Starz, 2014–present), based on the novels authored by Diana Gabaldon.

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While Stevenson’s lyrics shifted the focus on to the personal introspection of an unknown character who reflects on their lost youth and innocence, the original lyrics that Sir Harold Boulton wrote for a traditional tune gave a distinctly glorified image of ‘Bonnie Prince Charlie’. Far from representing a prince abandoning his army after defeat, they idealised ‘a lad born to be king’ going ‘over the sea to Skye’ in spite of a raging storm and leaving baffled enemies on the shore. At the same time, they introduced an idea of exile that would characterise representations of the Jacobite diaspora, while promising a new uprising before long; the last stanza concludes: Burned are our homes, exile and death Scatter the royal men; Yet ere the sword cool in the sheath Charlie will come again. (NLS, RB.m.143(121), digital.nls.uk/broadsides​ /view/?id=16416) In fact, the Jacobites who did not die in the uprisings were mostly executed, while some were transported to the colonies and some followed the Stuart court into voluntary exile (Zimmermann 2003); after 1746 the cause would prove impossible to revive and it would only continue to live in its forever hopeful, highly idealised image (Clyde 1994). In more recent times the Scottish diaspora has been discussed in more complex ways, since it was not only based on the defeat of the Jacobite cause. In-­depth discussions of Scottish emigration since Late Modern times (see, for instance, Devine 2003; 2012) draw attention to the fact that, like elsewhere in Europe, emigration is often associated with economic conditions. More specifically, in the case of Scotland, at the turn of the nineteenth century the notorious Highland Clearances led to the displacement of people across entire territories. In addition, political considerations could also dictate emigration policies, not least in relation to the establishment of colonies in North America. Discourses on the diaspora in the timeframe under discussion in this volume are therefore somewhat different from what can be expected in nineteenth-­century accounts of crossings and imperial settlement in various parts of the world. How the onset of the diaspora was represented in the popular press of the eighteenth century is thus a worthwhile object of investigation. In Scotland newspapers did not increase their circulation until well into the nineteenth century, and for most of the eighteenth century only Edinburgh was a significant centre of production and consumption, although publications also appeared in Glasgow and Aberdeen. On the other hand, Glasgow was an important centre for the circulation of cheaper, more accessible print material in the form of broadsides. Background information on the history of chapbooks, broadsides and the circulation of popular press in eighteenth- and nineteenth-­century

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Scotland is provided, among others, by Crawford (1963), Fox (2011) and Scally (2012); in addition, Dossena (2013) has focused on political song in Late Modern times, while Dossena (2017) presents a preliminary analysis of Jacobite documents gathered by Robert Forbes in The Lyon in Mourning, an extensive (albeit eclectic) collection of texts and even realia which Forbes (1708–75), episcopal Bishop of Ross and Caithness from 1762, had acquired between 1746 and 1775. In addition to scholarly publications, an overview of broadside ballads as a significant cultural phenomenon is also found in dedicated pages on the website of the National Library of Scotland (NLS) and in the English Broadside Ballad Archive (EBBA), and it is on the basis of broadsides that the creation and popularisation of concepts and idealised images, such as that of the Scot abroad, will be discussed in what follows. In the project called ‘The Word on the Street’ the NLS has digitised and made freely available as many as 1,800 broadsides on an extensive range of topics that would have elicited the interest of popular audiences between the seventeenth century and the turn of the twentieth: from wonders and crime to romance and humour. To these we may add the broadsides available in the Crawford Collection, also hosted by the NLS. In this case study, I will therefore take into consideration these resources, in order to discuss early representations of what would become the ‘Scottish Diaspora’, and the extent to which some crystallised images, such as those of the (romanticised) Highland rebel, can trace their roots back to the genre of the broadside ballad. In discussions of the diaspora three main images may be gleaned from the representations that have emerged from both literary and non-­literary sources over time: the exiled Jacobite, the emigrant seeking to improve his condition overseas, ­and – ­later – the enterprising Scot, whether this refers to trade and industry (such as in the case of Andrew Carnegie or Alexander Graham Bell) or to exploration (such as in the case of John Muir and David Livingstone). It is thus the aftermath of ‘the Forty-­five’, as the last Jacobite uprising is often labelled, that appears to have underpinned later representations in almost paradoxical ways. Although the Act of Proscription of 1746, which was not repealed until 1782, forbade the use of Highland dress except for men who enlisted in the Hanoverian army, kilts, sporrans and plaids are among the most recognisable symbols of Scotland all around the twenty-­ first-­ century world. This representation is therefore based on a nineteenth-­ century image that eighteenth-­century law had actually tried to domesticate, if not erase entirely. As a matter of fact, in the broadsides digitised by the NLS, kilts are only found in images or lyrics pertaining to very few texts, all dating from the nineteenth century and in a few cases actually referring to the Napoleonic Wars or the Crimean War. Among such instances there is ‘The Poor Discharged Soldier’, presumably published between 1858 and 1871 (L.C.Fol.178.A.2(217), digit​

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al.nls.uk/broadsides/view/?id=16857), which is preceded by a woodcut of a Highland soldier, the narrating voice in the text; we also find the very well-­ known ballad that praises the British army for its victory at the battle of Alma, fought on 20 September 1854; it was published in the same year as the battle itself, and describes the soldiers as the prototypical ‘Highland lads’, whose uniforms comprise both kilt and hose (RB.m.143(159), digital.nls.uk/broadsi​ des/view/?id=16451). When other ballads mention ‘Highland lads’, they stress their valour and attractiveness, especially among Lowland lasses, thus perpetuating the popular image offered in ‘The Highland Laddie’ (S.302.b.2(163), digital​ .nls.uk/broadsides/view/?id=15922), a mid-­ eighteenth-­ century song that praised the young man’s ‘graceful Mien, and manly Looks’ and which contrasted Lowland finery and vanity with Highland authenticity. A few lines are quoted below, in order to illustrate the kind of imagery that pervaded idealisations of Highland culture, the emblem of which is the ‘laddie’s plaidy’: The Lowland Lads think they are fine, But O they’re vain and idly gawdy, How much unlike that graceful Mien, and manly Looks of my Highland Laddie: O my bonny Highland Laddie, my handsome smiling Highland Laddie May heav’n still guard and love reward the Lowland Lass and her Highland Laddie. If I were free at will to chuse To be the wealthiest Lowland Lady I’d take young DONALD without Trews, With Bonnet blue and belted Plaidy. O my bonny &c. [. . .] A painted Room and silken Bed, May please a Lowland Laird and Lady. But I can kiss and be as glad, Behind a Bush in’s Highland Plaidy. O my bonny &c. Indeed, this is a stereotype in which the Lowland/Highland division is stressed for poetical effect and is specifically aimed at southern audiences, as the accompanying introductory text says that the ballad was sung in a London theatre with music arranged by Thomas Augustine Arne, the composer of Rule

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Britannia. However, the qualities of rustic life had already been emphasised in Allan Ramsay’s pastoral comedy The Gentle Shepherd, dating from 1725 and ‘reconceived as a ballad opera in 1729’ (Robertson-­ Kirkland 2020: 104). Indeed, the lyrics of ‘The Highland Laddie’ had appeared in a 1724 edition of Allan Ramsay’s works (see digital.nls.uk/special-­collections-­of-­prin​ ted-­music/archive/105685402, pp. 377–8), which also comprised an idyllic representation of pastoral Scotland in the song ‘The Broom of Cowdenknows’ (digital.nls.uk/special-­collections-­of-­printed-­music/archive/10568902, p. 308), some lines of which are quoted below, and where again the wealth and luxury of the upper classes in the city are supposed to be no competitor for the peace and contentment of a countryside relationship: HOW blyth ilk Morn was I to see The Swain come o’er the Hill? He skipt the Burn, and flew to me, I met him with good Will. O the Broom the bonny, bonny Broom, The Broom of Cowdenknows; I wish I were with my dear Swain, With his Pipe and my Ewes. [. . .] While thus we spent our Time by Turns, Betwixt our Flocks and Play I envy’d not the fairest Dame, Tho’ ne’er sae rich and gay. It is with this bucolic image of Scotland that the poetry of Robert Burns was also often associated, especially after Henry Mackenzie saluted him as the ‘Heaven-­taught ploughman’ in a 1786 article for the Lounger (Low [1974] 1995: 67). An image of Scotland was beginning to take shape that would prove both persistent and strongly idealised, not least on account of how Burns himself had represented the Highlands and exile (McGuirk 2007). Loss and exile equally underpinned many Jacobite ballads that framed separations in highly romanticised terms, as it was not unusual for the ‘Bonnie Prince’ to be concealed behind seemingly innocent references to distant lovers. One of the clearest examples is a ballad published in 1849, ‘Flora’s Lament for her Charlie’, in which the lyrics echo another well-­known and much older folk song, ‘Loch Lomond’ (see Pittock 1994: 136), as they recount the regret of a woman named Flora (presumably a reference to Flora Macdonald, who famously helped Charles Edward Stuart escape after Culloden) at having to leave Scotland and the Jacobite cause, represented by a symbolically named male hero whose death is lamented:

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case study 12 : ‘farewell to the highlands’ 341 It’s you’ll take the high road and I’ll take the low road And I’ll be in Scotland before you, For I and my true love shall never meet again, On the bonny, bonny banks of Benlomond. It’s not for the hardships that I must endure, Nor the leaving of Benlomond; But it’s for the leaving of my comrades all, And the bonny lad that I love so dearly, With his bonny laced shoes and his buckles so clear, And his plaid o’er his shoulders hung so rarely; One glance of his eye it would banish dull care, So handsome was the looks of my Charlie. But as long as I live and as long as I breath, I will sing of his memory sairly; My true love was taken by the arrows of death, And now Flora does lament for her Charlie. (RB.m.168(178), digital.nls.uk​ /broadsides/view/?id=16612)

On the other hand, opposing views emerged in Hanoverian songs, in which the Jacobite army was portrayed as cowardly and treacherous. In two songs, allegedly written by ‘a Soldier who was in the Engagement’ and printed in Sheffield in 1746, that is, presumably soon after the battle of Culloden itself (ebba.english.ucsb.edu/ballad/31484/image), the audience is invited to rejoice in the fact that ‘the Popish Pretender’ has been forced to flee and that his supporters are dead or will soon be executed. Some lines are quoted below from ‘A New SONG. Call’d the duke of Cumberland’s Victory over the Scotch Rebels at Cullodon-­Moor, near Inverness’: YOU Subjects of Britton now you may Rejoice, And pray for King George with Heart and Voice. The Popish Pretender has now run away, Just like his old Daddy no longer could stay. [. . .] Three thousand that Day we lay dead on the Ground Besides many Skulking in Cabbins we found; And many Deserted their Kale-­yards to set, Which put the Pretender into a great Fret. Even more patriotic tones are found in another song, printed on the same page, with the title ‘Englands GLORY; Or, Duke WILLIAMs Triumph over the Rebels in SCOTLAND’. This song also begins with an invitation to the audience to participate in the celebrations, and echoes the last two of four poems

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by John Duick that had appeared in the London Courant in 1745 and 1746 and which were reprinted with the title A Memorial for Britons (see digital.nls​ .uk/75240239). Representations of Scots and Scotland on either side of the border were therefore remarkably different. The Jacobite scare that had pervaded England led to staunchly antagonistic views of ‘the rebels’, and it would not be until much later that literary and artistic representations transformed Scotland into the epitome of sublime and picturesque landscapes. Such representations would then go on to underpin the nostalgia that, perhaps predictably, is the key concept conveyed in broadsides on emigration, although these date mostly from the nineteenth century, w ­ hen – ­as highlighted by Devine (2003; 2012) – the phenomenon increased. Both in art and in music stereotypical images of farewells were presented. The most famous case is possibly that of ‘Lochaber No More’, which is the title of both a painting and a song; the lyrics of the song had first appeared in Allan Ramsay’s Tea Table Miscellany (1724) and reflect on the pain of leaving loved ones behind when going to war: To leave thee behind me my heart is sair pain’d; But by ease that’s inglorious no fame can be gain’d; And beauty and love’s the reward of the brave And I maun deserve it before I can crave. Then glory, my Jeanie, maun plead my excuse; Since honour commands me, how can I refuse? Without it I ne’er can have merit for thee, And losing thy favour, I’d better not be. I gae, then, my lass, to win glory and fame, And if I should chance to come gloriously hame, I’ll bring a heart to thee with love running o’er, And then I’ll leave thee and Lochaber no more. Ramsay’s title was then adopted for a painting by John Watson Nicol, currently in the Fleming Collection in London, which dates from 1883 and presents an image that is in fact metaphorical in its extreme idealisation of a couple and a dog on a ship about to leave the coast. In the NLS collection, the ballad published in the second half of the nineteenth century is presented as ‘Donald’s Farewell to Lochaber’ (L.C.Fol.178.A.2(122), digital.nls.uk/br​ oadsides/view/?id=148869) and the printed text is preceded by the image of two shepherds wearing tartan plaids; the text, however, does not concern emigration; as in Ramsay’s eighteenth-­century original, it is a brooding reflection on the necessity of answering honour’s call, together with the promise never to leave again once war is over.

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Eighteenth-­century texts thus seem to continue their success and influence well into the nineteenth century, in an interesting blend of images that concern war, rebellion, nostalgia ­and – s­ imultaneously – pride in a distinctive identity that persists while it appears to be passing with time. In this respect, and in light of this seeming paradox, it may not be accidental that only very few texts are actually in Scots, the viability of which was admitted in literary expression, but which was stigmatised in everyday usage (Dossena 2012); the vast majority of texts are in English, presumably to cater for as wide an audience as possible. An overview of the ballads circulating in eighteenth-­century Scotland, such as in the collection published by David Herd in 1776 in Edinburgh, shows that the songs were labelled as both ancient and modern, thus stressing the contiguity between what was more traditional and what was more recent, and placing ‘heroic ballads’ alongside romantic love songs (Herd 1776). As a result, in such instances of popular culture war and peace coexisted in the idealised images evoked by the lyrics of the different texts. In addition, humour might also feature in the collections, such as in the six-­volume Scots Musical Museum, published in Edinburgh between 1787 and 1803 (see di​gital.nls.uk/special-­collections-­of-­printed-­music/archive/87793741) or in A curious collection of Scots tunes, with variations for the violin, and a bass for the violincello [sic] or harpsichord [1793?] (see archive.org/details/Sco​ tsTunesImages55241/page/n23/mode/2up), where the qualifier ‘curious’ aptly evokes the heterogeneous characteristics of the tunes that are presented without any lyrics, but only with their titles. In sum, this short case study has focused (mostly, although not exclusively) on collections of digitised broadside ballads hosted on the website of the NLS (see Plate 8), in order to outline how popular culture contributed to the creation of early images of the Scottish diaspora. Although emigration from Scotland grew considerably in the nineteenth century, both as a consequence of the Highland Clearances and of the expansion of the British Empire, the samples under discussion show that varying images emerge, some of which have become emblematic thanks to their continuing presentation, either through musical performance or through artistic renditions in paintings and lithographs. Among these, the image of the (exiled, defeated but undaunted) Jacobite and/or of the soldier going to war has become the epitome of the Scot abroad: a Highlander who is assumed to speak English and wear tartan, in a conflation of identities that would prove remarkably successful, in spite of its sometimes questionable authenticity.

Chapter Fourteen

WALES AND THE NEWS Sarah Ward Clavier

Introduction For almost all of the period 1640–1800 there existed no press on Welsh soil, and comparatively little news media was printed in the Welsh language. This did not, however, mean that Wales was an information backwater. This chapter will show that the Welsh were adept at seeking out news sources and sharing news. There was a very keen appetite for manuscript and printed material. From the late seventeenth century this included news media printed in Welsh as well as English. English newspapers, pamphlets and periodicals were keenly received by gentry households and their contents disseminated, as were the bespoke manuscript newsletters and letters of news which were one of the main sources of domestic news for early modern Welsh and English elites. For less wealthy news consumers there were ballads and almanacs, and (particularly in border areas) the oral dissemination of news by those travelling, selling and working for the gentry. This chapter will explore Wales and its relationship with the news media in six sections. It begins with a summary of Welsh and English historiography, before examining the available primary sources, many of which would bear further study. Section three outlines depictions of Wales in the news, particularly at times of crisis, and posits some tentative arguments about the Welsh response to these often-­crude stereotypes. Sections four and five take a brief chronological look at the developments in Welsh relationships with the news during two main periods: 1640–95 and 1695–1800.

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Historians, Wales and the News Scholarly studies of Wales and the news have been few and far between. This is particularly the case in relation to the sixty years between 1640 and 1700. Lloyd Bowen’s articles on seventeenth-­century Welsh news networks and the intersection between news and language are notable foundations on which to build. Sam Garland’s PhD research using the north-­east Welsh Mostyn newsletter collection demonstrated the interactions between scribal and printed forms of periodical news, and my own recent book explored the connections between north-­ east Welsh news culture and historical traditions of political and religious loyalism (Garland 2016; Ward Clavier 2020). Several scholars have considered Welsh news and print culture in relation to specific events or discrete periods. The early covert printing presses of Welsh Catholics have featured in research on the Catholic resistance after 1568. This work identified families and individuals involved in printing pro-­Catholic books, including the first book to be printed on Welsh soil, Y Drych Cristianogawl (The Christian Mirror) (Cleary 1957; Gruffydd 1958; 1997; 1998). There is, however, no evidence that these presses produced periodical literature. Bowen, Peter Lord and Mark Stoyle have written about the changing content and relevance of the stereotypical characterisation of Welsh men and women in the English press during the First Civil War (Bowen 2004; Stoyle 2000; Lord 1995). The late seventeenth-­century Welsh-­language almanac writer Thomas Jones and his successors have been the subject of a study by G. H. Jenkins and feature in his chapter on seventeenth-­century printing and publishing (Jenkins 1980; 1984; Lloyd 1998: 101–3). More broadly, W. J. Hughes’s early twentieth-­century work on depictions of the Welsh in English literature has been significantly augmented by that of Philip Schwyzer and Willy Maley (Hughes 1924; Maley and Schwyzer 2010). Although this clearly goes beyond the news, the content of these literary depictions interacts closely with that in news material, particularly that aimed at English audiences (see ‘Wales and the News to 1694’ below). The focus of all these works is on the consumption and spread of news, as well as the depiction of Welsh people in it. This might, perhaps, be explained by the absence of a printing press in Wales, and the late appearance of a regular Welsh-­language press offering news material. Scribal news production, in the form of personal letters, flourished among the gentry and the literate middling sort before the eighteenth century. This has traditionally fallen between two stools, however, in that Welsh historians have tended to view gentry culture as anglicised, while English historians have

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generally shied away from examining Wales in any depth. A detailed study of Welsh news consumption including scribal production would be very welcome. There has been somewhat more interest in the period 1700–1800, particularly in relation to the circulating schools and their impact on literacy, and the concurrent impact on printed religious material in the Welsh language. There have been no published studies of English-­language news consumption in Wales for this later period and, understandably, the focus switches to the production of Welsh-­ language material in Wales rather than the collection and spread of news. A consideration of news material beyond newspapers yields more fruit in both languages. Research examining the Welsh religious press touches briefly on the serial or news-­based content of early radical magazines such as Cylch-grawn Cynmraeg, the role of the Trevecca Press, and the methods of its sale and delivery (see Ballinger 1905). Welsh periodicals and early newspapers are discussed in chapters by Lisa Peters (2016), Huw Walters (1998) and Marion Löffler (2012). The work of Cathryn Charnell-­ White (2012), Elizabeth Edwards (2012), Mair Ffion Jones (2012) and Marion Löffler and Bethan Jenkins (2014) on ballads, serials, poetry and other printed material from Wales relevant to the French Revolution is valuable in providing an exploration of those genres. Welsh print culture more generally (with a focus on industrial South Wales) is examined by Jonathan Evans (2010). Bibliographers have shown more interest in Welsh news and print culture. Bibliographies have been produced of Welsh eighteenth-­ century ballads (Davies 1911), early periodicals (Walters 1998) and Welsh books and books printed in Wales (Rees 1987), as well as a general Cambrian Bibliography (Rowlands 1869). Book historians, literary scholars and historians of the country house have discussed the libraries of Welsh writers, collectors and gentlemen, and from these discussions useful information about news practices can be gleaned (Chadwick and Evans 2018; Rees and Walters 1970). There has been little mention of Welsh news or news consumption in works by English historians beyond general references to the flow of news between London and the provinces to a socially diverse range of audiences (Atherton 1999b: 51, 53–5; Pettegree 2014: 2, 134). When evidence is used from Wales, it forms part of wider comment on news culture in England and Wales more broadly (Barber 2013: 309). One exception within the broader field is Braddick’s chapter on cheap print in England and Wales, which discusses the integral part that London played in relation to Welsh print culture, as well as the

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role of religious works in encouraging a Welsh-­language response to print (Braddick 2011: 24, 26). The implicit assumption elsewhere that the Welsh approach to news consumption was not distinctive is supported in some respects. Early Welsh news consumers used many of the same methods as their English counterparts to acquire news. They subscribed to manuscript newsletters and newspapers and implored their contacts to send them details of the latest events at Court, in Parliament, and in London and European society. In these respects, Welsh news culture in the period to 1700 had many similarities with provincial English news-­gathering and news production. Yet the strength of the Welsh language in this period means that these similarities can only be taken so far. For regular news to reach the bulk of the Welsh population without mediation or translation there needed to be a Welsh-­language press, written and produced by those comfortable with Welsh orthography. This press, with a strong focus on religion, developed from 1718 onwards, and will be discussed in section five of this chapter.

The Sources The task of locating evidence of news transmission has always been somewhat difficult. In Wales there are few major seventeenth-­century printed news collections, but several substantial archives of scribal publications, for example the late seventeenth-­century Mostyn newsletters. This large collection comprises manuscript subscription newsletters as well as detailed personal letters of news from Court and legal insiders in London, sent to the north-­east Welsh gentleman Thomas Mostyn in the period 1672–99. The Brogyntyn papers in the National Library of Wales include newspapers, newsletters and other print items from 1660 onwards, as well as detailed letters of news from the mid-­sixteenth century (NLW, Brogyntyn MSS). The Wynn of Gwydir papers include subscription and personal letters from c. 1515–c. 1699, and the Wynnstay collections have two volumes of ‘Welsh Tracts’ containing printed material satirising the Welsh as well as material written by Welshmen (NLW, Wynnstay Printed vol. 1: Welsh Tracts, 1641–49; Wynnstay Printed vol. 2: Welsh Tracts, 1628–1742). Correspondence collections include not only material traces (such as print transfer) of printed news material, but also scribal publication of news material. This can include personal letters of news as well as hand-­copied news items. As ever, these large collections are a mine of information, but there are a range of other sources in Welsh archives which provide more of an

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interesting insight into how news was collected. Commonplace books and notebooks include items shared, copied and occasionally commented upon, from pro- and anti-­Buckingham libels to scurrilous verse about local governors and their sexual predilections (see NLW, Cardiff MS 2.169: Commonplace book, 1750–99; MS 3107B: Amseryddiaeth a Barddoniaeth, 1598–19th c.; MS 12350A: Diary &c. of John Davies, Ystrad; Bangor University Archives, MSS 422: Commonplace book from Anglesey, c. 1670). Financial records, from the extensive Chirk collection to single notebooks and ledgers, record items ordered and delivered from London, sometimes listing titles, their vendors and the carrier who brought them to their collectors (NLW, Chirk MSS). Finally, gentry library catalogues, in combination with correspondence and financial records, often include news pamphlets, controversial works and compilations of news-­sheets. Notable examples include the Penbedw, Llanerch, Chirk and Mostyn libraries (NLW, Chirk A 29: Library Catalogue, 1704; MS 9065E no. 2092: Catalogue of books at Mostyn, n.d.; Peniarth PB1: Catalogue of books at Penbedw, c. 1690s; MS 17126D: Catalogue of books at Llanerch library, 1778; MS 21244C: Catalogue of the books at Mostyn and Gloddaeth, c. 1727; MS 23938B: Catalogue of the Hengwrt Library, c. 1659). Further libraries are evidenced in sale catalogues, such as that of the author and antiquary Thomas Pennant, and it is likely that these provide further evidence of news collection. For the eighteenth century, Thomas Jones’s Welsh-­language almanacs can be consulted in the National Library of Wales or on the digitised database Eighteenth-­Century Collections Online (ECCO), as can those of several of his rivals or successors (Jones 1681; Jones 1689; Prys 1760). Welsh ballads exist in printed form in J. H. Davies’s A Bibliography of Welsh Ballads Printed in the 18th Century (London, 1911). An electronic index prepared by the Welsh School, Bangor University, the Welsh School at Cardiff University and the Language and Literature Committee of the Board of Celtic Studies includes 250 further ballads. Four thousand eighteenth- and nineteenth-­century Welsh ballads have been digitised and are available freely online at https://www.library.wales/discover/library-­resources/bal​lads. Surviving hard copy examples can be consulted at the National Library of Wales and Cardiff University Special Collections. The AHRC-­funded project ‘Wales and the French Revolution’ produced a series of anthologies (and extremely helpful extended introductions) of material including poetry, ballads, journals and newspapers, letters and pamphlets (Jones 1998; Löffler 2012; Charnell-­White 2012; Edwards 2012; Löffler and Jenkins 2014). Early periodicals such as

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Y Cylch-grawn Cynmraeg and Trysorfa Ysprydol are available on the open access repository ‘Welsh Journals Online’ via the National Library of Wales (National Library of Wales, Welsh Journals, https://​ journals.library.wales/home). One of the difficulties of this primary material is that it provides little access to the news practices and preferences of non-­gentry readers and listeners. Correspondence and financial accounts occasionally give us evidence of intermediaries ordering almanacs from London or Chester and distributing them within their circle. In a news culture that was oral and aural as well as written, any remaining traces are hard to find and harder to interpret. There are some indications of reading groups or storytelling communities in diaries, correspondence and memoirs. The diary of William Thomas of Llanfihangel-­ar-­Elai reveals one such use of almanacs as live entertainment, while the correspondence of the Morris brothers of Anglesey shows how their father learnt to read from the only literate resident in their parish, in order to read the almanacs (Jenkins 1984: 175). The subject awaits a detailed survey, for it is possible that a thorough archival sifting may establish or propose patterns at a general level. As for most printed material in this period, it is very difficult to get a sense of circulation levels of news sources in Wales, whether manuscript or printed. The Mostyn newsletters and correspondence show that, alongside printed copies purchased in London and sent to Wales, printed material was copied into letters and those letters circulated within their recipient’s social circle. This meant that one printed copy could have an extremely long life in Wales. Scribal news was subject to the same fate. It is possible to gauge from the longevity of scribal news publications something of their success, but since commercial factors were not the only ones affecting publications, even this is not wholly reliable. On the other hand, the surviving evidence is wide-­ranging particularly for gentry news-­collecting practices. There is significant scope to bring together the diverse news-­related sources in both English and Welsh to identify popular pamphlets, topics and acquisition methods in Wales, whether in a local, regional or national study. Evidence of attitudes to news items and media appears reasonably regularly in letters, and from the 1720s onwards there is an increasing amount of Welsh-­language news to examine, alongside questions of monoglot or bilingual readership. There is also the potential to explore the relationship between London and Wales in more detail, examining the networks of news writers, printers, booksellers, apprentices and gentry that led firstly to news culture having a presence in Wales, and secondly to the establishment of a native Welsh print culture.

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Wales and the News to 1694 As with communities across Britain and Ireland, the Welsh desire for the freshest news did not begin in the seventeenth century. An avid interest in news and contemporary developments is evident in fragmentary form in medieval manuscripts and Welsh-­language poetry, and though only a few manuscript ballads survive in Welsh, they deal with subjects such as the Babington plot of 1586, the translation of the Bible into Welsh, and the Gunpowder plot of 1­ 605 – ­all topics of contemporary news interest (Bowen 2017b: 25 and passim; Evans 2019: 212–13; Jones 1998: 245). By the early seventeenth century the Welsh gentry were evidently accustomed to seeking and receiving scribal and printed news material, using kinship and regional connections to obtain information from well-­connected sources at Court, in Parliament and in the Church of England. Generations of migration and patronage meant that these connections were well established (Griffith 2001; Evans 2019: 216–17). The Davieses of Gwysaney, for example, were a seemingly obscure north-­east Welsh gentry family based near Mold in Flintshire. Their connections with John Egerton, 1st Earl of Bridgewater (1579–1649), meant that they had access to all the freshest national and international news, however, and were able to use this to cement their status in their local region. Bridgewater had been fostered in north-­east Wales and maintained active connections in the region. By 1631 he was a Privy Council member and the Lord President of Wales. Captain Thomas Davies, a senior servant in Bridgewater’s household, was a conduit, bringing news into Wales from the 1620s until his death in 1655 (Huntington Library, EL 6547; EL 6540; EL 6538; EL 6601; EL 7875; NLW, Gwysaney Transcripts 8b; Gwysaney Transcripts 26). Packages of news were shared among friends and relatives: Thomas Cholmondeley summarised his newsletters for Sir Richard Wynn, Sir Roger Mostyn accessed the collections of Sir Richard Grosvenor, and Evan Edwards was forwarded second-­hand diurnalls by his brother and friends (NLW, MS 9067E no. 2509: Thomas Cholmondeley to Sir Richard Wynn, n.p., 30 June 1667; Flintshire Record Office, D/HE/466: William Edwards to Evan Edwards, Westminster, 19 October 1647). Welsh gentry culture had intricate and active kinship networks at its heart, and kin-­based patronage was used to obtain otherwise privileged information from eyewitness sources. As Lloyd Bowen has argued, the Welsh gentry were ‘well integrated’ into wider news cultures, with a ‘thickening skein of epistolary connections’ to keep them up to date with the latest developments (Bowen 2015: 131). ‘Bilingual

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brokers’ were able to interpret and transmit news to ordinary people, whether from the gentry, clergy or non-­elite groups (Bowen 2015: 128). This all runs contrary to the general contemporary assumption that Wales was a backwater without access to such information. Instead, news affected men and women and, in different forms, a range of socio-­economic groups (Millstone 2016: 168). Early Stuart satirists described it as a hunger, and Welsh correspondents as loot or treasure (see Chester Record Office, DSS 1/2/6: Anne Thelwall, Ruthin, to Lady Shakerley, c. 1688). These networks were to prove vital in the febrile period 1640–42. In the early days of the Long Parliament the political nation was enlarged significantly socially and geographically, as cheap political texts became more easily available, news was read out in alehouses and inns, and transmitted orally from person to person. Wales was no exception to this (Peacey 2015: 283–4). Surviving gentry family collections reveal a rapidly increasing volume and variety of print and scribal news material. In 1640, for example, the future royalist commander Sir Thomas Salusbury of Lleweni, Denbighshire (1612–43) received private letters, subscription newsletters and print matter from at least six correspondents, including two MPs (NLW Lleweni 170: Newsletter, 14 December 1640; NLW Lleweni 174: Newsletter, 19 January 1641). Salusbury was sent packages of ‘what is in printe’ by one correspondent and any other diurnalls by another (NLW, Lleweni 190: James Lloyd to Sir Thomas Salusbury, n.p., c. 1641). Unsurprisingly, the main themes of this barrage of news were parliamentary politics, religion and the fate of prominent individuals, from archbishops to MPs. Printed speeches supplemented first-­hand accounts of that day’s events in Parliament, and the king’s proclamations provided a counterbalance to the reports of Parliament’s actions on key issues such as the Scottish army and the militia. John Mostyn MP, writing to his father Sir Roger in November 1641, sent his own account of events in Ireland as reported in the House, as well as of printed material that was published, before enclosing ‘all the printed news’ to supplement it (NLW, MS 9063E: John Mostyn to Sir Roger Mostyn, London, 11 November 1641). This news was weighed for accuracy, checked against other sources and discussed at length. It was to prove vital in determining allegiance. The development of a nascent royalist grouping is evident in positions taken on, for example, the trial of the Earl of Strafford, iconoclasm in London and the treatment of the bishops. Anti-­Welsh stereotyping by parliamentarian pamphleteers added to an already tense situation. The depiction of the Welsh formed a satirical, comical and sometimes

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extremely politicised theme in seventeenth-­ century English news. Common as an affectionately portrayed character on the English stage from Dekker to Shakespeare, from 1642 these depictions took on a new edge. Anti-­Welsh stereotyping became a tool by which parliamentarian propagandists attempted to diminish the threat posed by the Welsh, who were well known for their allegiance to the Crown and who did raise significant forces from 1642 to fight for Charles I. Mocking Welsh speech, backwardness, poverty and naivety in both text and woodcut image, these works depicted the Welsh royalist allegiance as the result of ignorance and irrationality (Brownlees 2009; Bowen 2004; Stoyle 2000). Parliamentarian writers connected royalism with staunch support for the Church of England and episcopacy, depicting the Welsh as enslaved by traditional worship and the Prayer Book. Examples include The Welch-mens Prave Resolution (London, 1642), Newes from Wales or the Brittish Parliament (1642), The Welchmans Complements (London, 1643) and The Welch Embassadour, or, The Happy newes his worship hath brought to London (London, 1643). In a change from the stereotype of the Elizabethan stage, these occasional pamphlets and newsbooks aimed to neuter or feminise the Welsh in language and potentially on the battlefield. Brownlees, Bowen and Stoyle have all written of the gendered language used in these texts, aimed at an English audience who would recognise the stereotype and understand its significance (Brownlees 2009: 61–2; Bowen 2004: 365). That the Welsh were aware of these attacks is clear from both a two-­volume collection of anti-­Welsh pamphlets, and more significantly their response in a petition to Parliament in 1642, which addressed the ‘contempt’ shown to the Welsh by the press, and requested that Parliament act to stop it (NLW, Wynnstay Printed vol. 1: Welsh Tracts 1641–49; Wynnstay Printed vol. 2: Welsh Tracts, 1628– 1742; The Humble Petition of Many Hundred Thousands, inhabiting the Thirteene Shires of Wales, 1642, 3). It appears from the continued stream of anti-­Welsh invective that this request had rather the opposite effect than intended. Parliamentarian partisans were not the only ones creating and publishing printed news material. The king realised the power of the press and was able to use royal proclamations to publicise his own arguments and messages across the country. In effect, proclamations were a form of news produced by the monarch, promulgating the king’s policies and announcing major events of importance. Charles was able to distribute this form of news via the already existing local government networks, particularly in areas where his support was well established

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(see Kyle 2015). One surviving portfolio of proclamations demonstrates how this worked in North Wales. From February to September 1642 at least twenty-­five printed items, mostly royal proclamations, were sent to the High Sherriff of Flintshire, David Pennant, who used kinship and social networks to efficiently distribute copies to parishes across the county. An oath declaring loyalty to the king, and that the parliamentarian commanders were traitors and rebels, was also administered in the same way in 1642 in parish churches, in English and Welsh, using delegated local representatives who had first received manuscript and printed messages (British Library, Add MS 46399A fol. 78: A Protestation and oath to be taken by the Inhabitants of the Sixe Counties of Northwales). When Sir Thomas Myddelton responded angrily to this oath, he made sure that it, too, was printed (Myddelton 1644). Newsbooks continued, despite the ongoing warfare, to make their way into Wales. Indeed, towards the end of the First Civil War news material was used to try and force an end to a siege. In August 1646 Sir Thomas Mytton sent in to Denbigh Castle a ‘diurnall’ to show his opponent Sir William Salesbury that further resistance was useless. As a strategy it did not ­work – ­Salesbury held out until October ­1646 – ­but it does demonstrate how news could be used as an instrument (Tucker 1992: 120). The Welsh royalist forces were finally defeated in the siege of Harlech in March 1647, holding out even after the king himself had conceded defeat. The resulting change in national and local government led to concurrent alterations in the nature of Welsh news culture. The fascination with current affairs continued apace, though sources of information were reduced as most of those Welshmen in positions of influence were removed. An Interregnum royalist culture of dissent developed, some of which demonstrates the long-­term influence of news culture. Welsh- and English-­language royalist poetry by poets such as Huw Morys and Rowland Watkyns was influenced by widespread tropes in English royalist pamphlets and newspapers about parliamentarian social origins and Puritan sexual and financial hypocrisy, while scribal ballads reveal the rich influence of satirical anti-­ Puritanism (Morys, quoted in Morrice 1911: 227–8; Watkyns 1662; Denbighshire Record Office, PD/19/1/212: A new Ballad of the Plagues wherewith Wrexham in denbighshire is sorely tormented this yeare 1647; Ward Clavier 2018: 39, 60). Gentry libraries reveal widespread ownership of royalist books such as Eikon Basilike (see Plate 9), published as a posthumous defence by Charles I of his principles and actions, and viewed as a direct challenge to the legitimacy of the Commonwealth (Ward Clavier forthcoming; Suggett 2002: 148–50;

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Capp 2012: 66–7). A continued culture of petitioning, this time on the parliamentarian side, shows that this relationship with current affairs and varied media forms was not limited to a conservative culture of opposition. Vavasor Powell’s A Word for God (1655), a pamphlet in petition form with 322 signatures appended, combined a defence of the ‘Good Old Cause’ with a refutation of the Protectorate. This led to a counter-­publication by Walter Cradock signed by 762 people of a more orthodox Puritan persuasion, in support of the Lord Protector (Jenkins 1987: 63). Carriers, hawkers, armies and those travelling to and from the capital continued to bring news material in this period, and it was no doubt still consumed with fervour across Wales (Raymond 1996: 238–40). Despite the best efforts of the Commission for the Propagation of the Gospel in Wales, the regional committees, and the Welsh and English religious radicals who sought to advance the reformation in Wales, oppositional politics and religious sentiments continued to be widespread. Although radical groups did gain adherents and radical publications and accounts of disputations are evident in Wales, many nevertheless continued to adhere to the Church of England (Jenkins 1987: 63). This was lamented by the Major-­Generals, including Charles Fleetwood, who described the Welsh as having ‘envenomed hearts against the ways of God’ in 1655. Influential men such as John Jones of Maesygarnedd, the regicide, millenarian and parliamentarian politician, also decried ‘how many are there in poore Wales, that thincke God sufficiently served, by goeing once a weeke to heare a hudle of Prayers, delivered many times by a poore creature, whose mind is in his ­alehouse . . . ­and them to return to their carnall sports, and licentious pleasures’ (NLW, MS 11440D fols 121–5: John Jones, Dublin, to Lowri Gwynn, 25 May 1653). As a result of their consistent adherence to the Church and the Crown, following the restoration of Charles II in 1660 many Welshmen were able to use the rhetoric of loyalty to gain positions in local, regional and national institutions. As their appetite for news had only been quickened by the events of the 1640s and 1650s, the number of gentry manuscript newsletter subscribers increased and pamphlets on current theological controversies and political disputations continued to pour over the border. Some gentlemen, such as Thomas Mostyn of Gloddaith, collected topical pamphlets and bound them together, keeping their newsletters and correspondence in separate volumes and in different sections of their libraries (Private collection, Mostyn Hall). Personalised letters of news were sent by those with an insider view, such as Dr Owen Wynne (1652–1700), lawyer and private secretary

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to the Secretary of State, Sir Leoline Jenkins (1625–85). Copies of the official newspaper the London Gazette were eagerly sought, to the point that their popularity sometimes led to disputes and delays in the post itself. Roger Whitley, Deputy Postmaster General from 1672 to 1677 and himself a Welshman from Flintshire, wrote to Mr Ballard, the postmaster of Usk, about delays to the post caused by the postbag being opened. He reprimanded Ballard, noting reports that Ballard allowed servants to ‘take out the Gazette, out of Uskke Bagg, and stay by the way for Gentlemen to read them &c: I believe, in the three Kingdomes the like is not to be heard of ’ (The Postal Museum and Archive, POST 94/17 fo. 344: Roger Whitley to Mr Ballard, 28 April 1677). As such an offence could potentially lead to the loss of a lucrative office, the desire of Welsh gentlemen to glimpse the news was clearly powerful indeed. Aside from ballads and broadsheets, many seventeenth-­ century scribal and print publications were principally confined to a gentry audience because of their price, scarcity and language. An estimated 90 per cent of the population of Wales in this period were monoglot Welsh-­speakers, and though the work of the Welsh Trust (1674–84) meant that more Welsh children had been taught to read and write in English, and cheap Welsh-­ language books had been produced and distributed, there was still not the level of literacy that made for a very large Welsh market. Although printed books and pamphlets had been printed legally in the Welsh language since Sir John Prys’s Yny Lhyvyr Hwnn (1546), there was still no regular Welsh-­language newsbook or newspaper. Thomas Jones proposed a monthly digest of news in Welsh in his 1691 almanac, but the lukewarm response to this proposal stopped the project from going ahead (Jenkins 1978: 233–4). Nevertheless, between 1680 and 1714 Jones produced popular annual Welsh almanacs which contained news items. The relaxation of the licensing laws in 1695 meant that Jones was able to return from London to set up a Welsh press in Shrewsbury, from which he produced a range of affordable Welsh-­language literature including his famous almanacs. These combined astrology with popular news material and poetry, and were bought and shared, their popularity apparently leading many to learn to read. Jones also established an efficient distribution network of booksellers, agents and clergymen, and this gave his work a wide readership by the standards of the time (Jenkins 1987: 209–10, 215–16). Jones’s readership was a humbler one than the gentlemen who bespoke their news from London, and though ordinary monoglot Welsh people were not entirely isolated from news culture before this point, cheap and accessible Welsh-­language material made

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the experience a more immediate one. Although Jones had a monopoly granted for his Welsh almanacs, he soon had a rival in John Jones of Caeau, near Wrexham, who began publishing his Welsh almanac from 1702. This was to set the scene for a vastly expanding Welsh market in the eighteenth century and beyond (Jenkins 1980).

Wales and the News, 1695–1800 In 1695 the Licensing of the Press Act (1662) expired and regional presses mushroomed. A concomitant growth in demand for printed literature is visible in Wales as well as England. This was also driven in part by an increase in literacy following educational schemes such as the Anglican circulating schools set up by the Reverend Griffith Jones of Llanddowror from 1731, running until 1779. The schools were meant to teach the basics of reading over approximately three months, before the instructor moved on to another parish. It is estimated that this initiative alone taught nearly half of the population to read Welsh. Another smaller-­scale scheme organised by Thomas Charles in North Wales began in 1785 (Yates 2019: 274, 277–9; Williams 1979: 207–8). The Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) also established libraries and organised schemes for book provision. All of this activity drove a rapid increase in literacy in Wales during the eighteenth century (Rees 1969: 37). This led to further demand for Welsh print from a range of new and old readerships, and the number of Welsh printed books grew from 112 in 1660–99 to 614 in 1700–49 and to 1,907 in 1750–99 (Jenkins 1997: 371). Welsh authors increasingly used the new presses in border towns such as Chester and Shrewsbury. These towns sat on major trade routes passing through North Wales to Ireland, and it was easy for these authors to visit and see their works through the press (Rees 1969: 33–4). A commercial letterpress was set up in Chester in 1712, and other printers at Bristol and Oswestry also served the Welsh market. The first official press on Welsh soil was established at Trefhedyn, Cardiganshire, in 1718. A significant amount of what was printed at these new Welsh and English border presses was religious books and pamphlets (in both languages), and the surviving news material from this period is confined to almanacs and periodicals. John Rhydderch published the first Welsh almanac to be printed in Wales in 1734, and ballads and broadsides were printed in Chester and Shrewsbury in significant numbers for the Welsh market (Jenkins 1978: 237–8; Lord 1995: 10). Welsh almanacs had a particular ‘literary flavour’, including poetry and literary prose as well as advice, a

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diary and news items (Rees 1969: 40). They also fostered Welsh culture by celebrating in print some of the remaining gentry patrons of Welsh poets (Löffler 2012: 5). Some of this poetry was connected to events of the ­day – ­the work of Huw Morys, for example, had occasionally a political edge born of his reaction to current events. This was also a feature of some borders news productions. The poet Richard Llwyd published his poems in the Chester Chronicle, for example, and that newspaper acted effectively as his ‘patron’ (Constantine 2017: 113). Welsh ballads emanated from borders printers such as Thomas Durston, John Rhydderch or Stafford Prys initially, moving to Welsh presses in Carmarthen, Brecon and Holyhead as the century progressed. By the end of the eighteenth century there were six towns in Wales with presses active in ballad printing, five of these in the north (Jones 1998: 5). Trefriw was the North Welsh centre of ballad printing, and the poet-­printer Dafydd Jones had set up a press there by 1776. He was followed in his trade by his son and grandson, and ballads were an important part of the business (Evans 1937: 14–15; Davies 1911; Jones 1998). Carmarthen was the equivalent in South Wales (Davies 1911: v–vi). Ballads were the most frequently printed Welsh-­ language items to emerge from the presses of Wales and the borders. It has been suggested that 90 per cent of printed books from 1710 to 1730 were ballads (Jenkins 1978: 161; Parry 1962: 266). Due to their low price they were available to a greater range of the potential reading public and, on account of their dual oral and print form, were also accessible to the illiterate if sung. Ballads dealt with familiar broad themes of love and death as well as reproducing Welsh folk tales, but they also reported current events, especially disasters such as plague, wars or earthquakes, sensational murders and daring deeds (Rees 1969: 40; Davies 1911: viii; Jones 1998: 247). ‘The Young Squire and his Father’s Servant-­maid’ is one of a number believed to be based loosely on real-­ life tales such as that of Hannah Snell, born 1723, who joined a regiment under the name of James Gray to locate her husband, fighting in her disguise before returning to London (Davies 1911: xiv). The wars between England and France and the American Revolution also feature prominently, and international events such as the French bubonic plague outbreak of 1720 were given the ballad treatment. From 1793 ballads undertook war reporting, with a small number of ballad writers singing about particular battles, heroes or campaigns relating to the wars with the French. Robert Roberts of Llannor, Caernarfonshire, for example, probably used others’ direct or eyewitness experience of Admiral Lord Howe’s defeat of the French off the isle of Ushant in the

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Atlantic Ocean in 1794 when writing his ballad on the subject (Jones 1998: 43, 48). This work and that by Hugh Jones, Glan Conwy (1797), show the growing importance of news journalism to ballad writers, and demonstrates the way that they wove news information into their songs (Jones 1998: 55). Others described local events, such as the arrival of the Methodists in North Wales, providing a ‘running commentary’ on the progress of the movement across the region. The death in a riding accident of the regionally important North Welsh politician Sir Watkin Williams Wynn was recounted in a ballad of 1749. There were also accounts of amusing hyper-­ local events, such as that describing sportsmen in Nantconwy who went out to shoot an otter and ended up killing a black lamb, or the vision of a young girl in Merionethshire (1729) (Davies 1911: xv–xviii, xxiii, 9, 18, 35). Religious themes or interpretations of events were common, and Constantine has argued that Welsh-­ language broadsheet ballads offer a ‘profoundly (not to say grimly) religious interpretation of current affairs from shipwrecks to the events of the French Revolution’ (2017: 106). Political news material featured as strongly in eighteenth- as it had in seventeenth-­century Welsh literature. It has been argued that the quantity of political literature printed between the 1770s and the end of the century increased sixfold (Löffler 2012: 2–3). Some works survive in relation to the American War of Independence (1775–83) from both critical and positive positions (Charnell-­White 2012: 8). Welsh loyalism was still strong in the eighteenth century, and historians have noted patriotic and loyalist ballads and songs during the early years of the French revolutionary wars (Constantine and Johnston 2013: 3). Radical pro-­revolutionary views were also expressed, often linked (not always fairly) to religious nonconformity. The early (and short-­lived) periodical the Miscellaneous Repository, neu y drysorfa gymmysgedig, for example, ran from summer 1795 to 1796 and included radical and political material, written and published by Thomas Evans, the first Unitarian minister in Wales (Walters 1993: 46). Material on this topic also exposes the breadth of news consumption by some Welshmen. As Cathryn Charnell-­White demonstrates in relation to Welsh poetry of the French Revolution, Welsh poets read almanacs, newspapers, periodicals, pamphlets, sermons and books, in Welsh and English, exchanging material within their networks and creating poetry which spoke to the news events of the time. This poetry was written by Tories and radicals, Anglicans as well as Methodists, Baptists and Unitarians, but was inspired and formed by events in France (Charnell-­White 2012: 1, 4). One example from 1792 Denbighshire demonstrates the

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interaction between printed books, news, religious tensions and poetry. John Thomas of Penffordd-­wen composed a plygain carol that condemned Thomas Paine following rumours that a local Methodist had been corrupting local workmen using Paine’s Rights of Man (Charnell-­ White 2012: 18). Fears about religious and political radicalism on the international stage were mapped on to local concerns, and via rumour became something worth responding to in the form of a conservative Welsh-­language carol. As this example demonstrates, Welsh manuscript culture interacted effectively with print, forming part of a local, national and international discourse. Thomas was not alone in seeing Paine and his works as a threat worth countering, and these works sat against a backdrop of loyalist protests and the burning of an effigy of Paine in Cardiff. Connections were made, furthermore, between the news of the past and the contemporary present. The regicide of Louis XVI was related back to that of Charles I, itself the subject of Welsh poetry, libels, ballads and other news-­based material. On the other hand, the repression of radicals and reformers was a theme in radical materials. This too could be traced back to the ‘Good Old Cause’ of the Civil Wars, Interregnum and Restoration. The Baptist minister, anti-­slavery campaigner and political radical Morgan John Rhys (1760–1804), the editor of Y Cylchgrawn Cynmraeg, was persecuted for his work, and emigrated to America to found his own colony in 1794. Early Welsh newspapers were affected strongly by geographical difficulties which tended to make them precarious and short-­lived. The first attempt at a Welsh language periodical, Tlysau yr Hen Oesoedd (Gems of Past Ages) (Figure 14.1), consisting of a collection of ancient Welsh poetry, was published by Lewis Morris in 1735, but it only lasted for one issue. Others followed but were similarly unsuccessful. These included Trysorfa Gwybodaeth (Treasury of Knowledge, 1770) and Cylch-grawn Cynmraeg (Welsh Magazine, 1793). Fifteen fortnightly issues of Trysorfa Gwybodaeth were published between March and September 1770 and it included eight pages of home and foreign news alongside Welsh history, essays and poetry. As Huw Walters has argued, this was an ambitious project for which the Welsh reading public was not ­ready – ­the magazine folded after its editor and publisher Josiah Rees incurred debts of over £100 (Walters 1998: 197). Y Cylch-grawn Cynmraeg was the work of Baptist radical Morgan John Rhys, and reflected his pro-­reform, pro-­French Revolution political stance as well as his anti-­Calvinist views. This publication failed after its fifth number because of problems of distribution and collecting payments from distributors as well as its radical content (Walters

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Figure 14.1  Tlysau yr Hen Oesoedd, 1735 (© Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru/National Library of Wales)

1998: 197–8). The first religious journal in Welsh, Trysorfa Ysprydol (Spiritual Treasury), appeared in 1799, founded and edited by two of North Wales’ leading Calvinistic Methodists, Thomas Charles of Bala (1755–1814) and Thomas Jones of Denbigh (1756–1820). It was a product of the religious revival, aimed at Calvinist Methodists. As a publication it ran from 1799 to 1827, though its first incarnation lasted only two years due to the ill-­health of its editors. In that period only six numbers were published (Walters 1998: 198). The Welsh terrain caused problems in both gathering news and circulating copies, while problems with the supply of the necessary stamped paper stock caused economic difficulties (Peters 2016: 195). The existence of longer-­established English-­language newspapers in border towns such as Chester, Shrewsbury and Bristol made it hard for new Welsh newspapers to compete in regional terms, even though subscribers often purchased more than one newspaper. The first Chester newspaper, the Chester Weekly Journal, was established in 1721, and the long-­running Chester Courant began (as the Weekly Courant) in

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1732 (Nuttall 1969: 17–19). The first Welsh newspaper was, by comparison, not published until 1804. The Cambrian was an English-­language newspaper based in Swansea and lasted from 1804 until 1930. It was soon to be joined by the North Wales Gazette (1808–) and the first Welsh-­language newspaper, Seren Gomer (Star of Gomer, 1814–15). With the Cambrian, the cross-­border connections are again evident, as the manager of that newspaper was born in London, apprenticed to a London stationer, and most probably began his career on the Worcester Journal (Thomas 2003: 60). Problems attracting English-­language advertisers, alongside distribution difficulties, were blamed for the demise of Seren Gomer and the dominance of the English-­language press in Wales (Peters 2016: 196). Newspapers, serials and pamphlets also continued to arrive from England, both from London and from printers in Chester, Bristol and other border towns. The Morris brothers referred regularly to English news and periodicals in their correspondence, and gentry family libraries, accounts and diaries from across Wales show that it was a commonplace to receive newspapers and periodicals from across the border. London newspapers and periodicals such as the Tatler and Gentleman’s Magazine were eagerly consumed. One family even produced their own ‘newspaper’. Marion Löffler has described the handwritten ‘Gazette Extraordinary’ written by the Griffith family of Garn and Plasnewydd, Denbighshire, of 6 January 1794, which included local news, advertisements and a ‘poets’ corner’, and which reflected the mood of the region’s gentry concerning the French, the Crown and prominent local individuals such as Sir Watkin Williams Wynn (Löffler 2012: 4). Provincial newspapers from border towns were another principal channel by which news reached Wales, by reproducing announcements from the official gazette, opinions from different viewpoints and ideologies on major events, and including court reports of sensational trials, such as those for treason. Titles included the Chester Chronicle, Hereford Journal and the Shrewsbury Chronicle. Of these the Shrewsbury Chronicle, possibly the most well-­read newspaper in Wales, was strongly loyalist and paternalist, while the Chester Chronicle was politically radical (Löffler 2012: 12). These newspapers also published Welsh writers and addressed Welsh audiences, and routinely included Welsh-­language poetry and advertisements, with no evidence that this was viewed negatively by English-­language readers. When newspapers arrived, as with seventeenth-­century news material, information was copied, shared, circulated and read to those who could not read it themselves. Newspapers were hired out, and coffee houses, inns and book clubs provided venues to read and share the

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news (Löffler 2012: 4). Ballads and poems interacted with these newspapers, indicating both the widespread reading of newspapers and contemporary fears about the impact of inaccurate news reporting and the potential for radical ideological messages to be imparted to innocent readers (Jones 1998: 42–3). Welsh printed material was sold initially by networks of agents across Wales. Thomas Jones was the first to set up a wide-­ranging network of vendors for his almanacs, securing distributors who were mercers, butchers, grocers and ironmongers, though the growth of dedicated booksellers in major towns slowly supplanted this as the eighteenth century progressed (Jenkins 1978: 249–50; Lord 1995: 10; Rees 1969: 37). For those who were unable to reach market towns, itinerant booksellers, carriers, pedlars and chapmen provided an important, though not entirely reliable, service (Jenkins 1978: 251). Ballads had long been a particular favourite of hawkers and chapmen, as they were cheap, sold in great numbers and were easy to carry from place to place (Jones 1998: 247; Spufford 1981: 111–28). Other Shrewsbury-­ based printers also saw the value in the North Welsh market, and either attended Wrexham fair or sent agents to attend. Richard Marsh, a Wrexham bookseller, attended the fair as the Shrewsbury printer Thomas Durston’s agent after 1756 (Rees 1969: 33). Religious networks supplemented these commercial networks. Nonconformist groups had their own distribution networks through which religious and political works could travel, including Welsh and English publications relating to contemporary affairs (Löffler 2012: 3).

Conclusion The Welsh news landscape changed significantly over the roughly 160 years discussed in this chapter. Welsh enthusiasm for news was always present, though in the seventeenth century the subscription newsletters, pamphlets and newsbooks were confined largely to the gentry who could afford to either bespeak them or have them sent from London. The news helped to structure the religious and political debates that pervaded the entire period, and in the case of the Civil Wars it was part of the process of forming an allegiance. In the eighteenth century access to printed and scribal news increased immensely due to an explosion in Welsh- and English-­language literacy, prompted by initiatives in education. Cheap Welsh-­ language news material arrived, and was consumed alongside older media such as newsletters, verse and song. From the late seventeenth century onwards there were news media for the ordinary monoglot Welsh population, and

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less need to rely on bilingual brokers or interpreters. Welsh periodicals and newspapers were less successful before the nineteenth century. Problems of market appeal, distribution and sales were rife, and it was not until 1804 that the first Welsh newspaper, the Cambrian, was published in Swansea. In this period we see the first information revolution in Wales, born from a lively interest and sparking into a raging fire.

Chapter Fifteen

EUROPEAN EXCHANGES, NETWORKS AND CONTEXTS Brendan Dooley

N

ews is a four-­l etter word, said a writer for the New-York Gazetteer (in a number dated 1 September 1783). Remarking upon the coincidence of these four letters with the initials of the four compass points and citing his original source as ‘The Edenburgh Gazette’, he drew a conclusion equally critical of writers and readers: ‘the four winds (the initials of which make the word NEWS) are not so capricious, or so liable to change, as our public intelligences’. At the time when he wrote, midway between two world-­shaking revolutions, news had become a constant accompaniment to daily life, drawing cries and laughter, animating conversations, raising fears, creating doubts, fomenting discontent, celebrating triumphs and forming an undercurrent to experiences of all kinds. Not long afterward, the regularity of news reading would be compared by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel to a kind of secular morning prayer, providing a moment of communion with a larger ­community – ­the city, the nation, the w ­ orld – a­ t the threshold of modernity (Hegel 1974: 360; Anderson [1983] 2006: 35; Dooley 2010: 2). However, news being somehow borne on the air from places near and far was already a constant sensation well before 1800, also because the English-­language press drew extensively on information sources regarding every part of the globe (Arblaster 2005). The period between the Thirty Years War and the Napoleonic Wars, two global conflicts in which Britain played a key role, saw the development and integration of European communication networks on an unprecedented scale, along with the formation of new types of news publication capable of conveying details and impressions of a rapidly changing geopolitical order to the first mass audiences. To be sure, for speeding up the transmission of information between regions, 364

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countries and cities, the groundwork had already been well laid in the previous period by the creation of public post routes and media to move along ­them – ­not to mention improvements in literacy education all over (Houston 1988; Caplan 2016). Personages involved in the international transfer of news included diplomats and merchants, official agents and spies, respected writers and literary hacks. Obviously, transfer points were deaf and blind to the quality of the content, so error and falsehood circulated as freely as truth and fact. But our concern in this chapter is to trace the information, not to test it. Indeed, current scholarship moving beyond the merely anecdotal allows some generalisations about patterns of transmission and exchange from time to time (Raymond and Moxham 2016). We will try to fill in some of the remaining gaps using data from ongoing research, while taking account of recent studies that tend to emphasise continuities as well as discontinuities, not only between the press history of Britain and the press history of neighbouring states, but also between the history of printed newspapers and of older media types. The same wars and other calamities that interrupted commerce and threw networks into disarray were always and everywhere the very stuff of news. Particularly fertile generators of new genres were the English Civil War and the Thirty Years War, which in turn received the effects of news distribution while supplying new material for consumption within an early modern news bubble. Major contributors shared means, methods and material on a regular basis; and no wonder, considering the interconnectedness of actual events (Jessen 1971; von Krusenstjern and Medick 1999; Raymond 1996). New work has shown that unrest occurring in Naples was discussed as far away as in London, whereas rebellious Neapolitans took cues from regime-­ changing episodes in Civil War Britain. But the process was repeated from time to time, culminating in the revolutionary events of the last quarter of the eighteenth century, as the pace of distribution attempted to keep up with the pace of change, resulting in a complex dynamic between event and narration. As has often been remarked, the first regular written news was mostly about elsewhere, in part due to the small advantage of writing nearby news that was easier received by word of mouth, and in part due to the dangers of saying anything too openly about the local authorities (Wilke 1987). Handwritten newsletters, a mixed genre combining the characteristics of diplomatic and commercial correspondence, were already available on a limited scale in Elizabethan times, mostly talking about events variously distant from wherever the supposed readers were located, some aggregating such reports into a single, generally

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anonymous episodic format (Infelise 2002; Kyle and Peacey 2008). The first weekly printed news-­sheets produced in Strasbourg (Alsace) in 1605 consisted (as the author/publisher/inventor Johann Carolus insisted to his city officials) of nothing more nor less than compilations of material from the regular public handwritten newsletters. Successive publications in other places adopted this winning formula (Weber 2006). Still in the mid-­seventeenth century, the pioneering Paris Gazette, a newspaper begun in 1631 and twenty years later still run by the heirs of founder Théophraste Renaudot under supervision by the Secretary of State, began with the farthest news and worked inward, as we see from a typical number dated 2 July 1650, including reports from various places, distinguished by the typical newsletter headings giving place and date, as noted in Table 15.1, in the order in which they appear in the paper. News rhetoric here comes largely from the sources, such that even such expressions as ‘our’ troops or ‘we’ did this or that, in each report, may refer back to the authors of material emanating from the original place, unless particular editorial interventions have been imposed according to the official playbook of the Bourbon monarchy and Table 15.1  Datelines in the Paris Gazette, 2 July 1650 Place

Date

Number of lines

Naples Rome Venice Milan Leghorn Genoa ‘Chester on the border with Ireland’ Barcelona ‘Barwick on the border with Scotland’ Turin Toulon Marseilles London La Bassée Saint Quentin Beauvais Compiégne Paris

1 June 9 6 June 20 8 June 25 10 June 2 12 June 15 15 June 8 16 June 6 17 June 11 17 June 16 18 June 4 20 May (20 June?) 36 21 June 8 23 June 9 16 June 65 27 June 25 29 June 5 29 June 29 2 July 34

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Cardinal Mazarin. The ordering of places (which changes little from issue to issue) reflects not the importance, but the date of arrival or availability of the information, such that the oldest news (from Naples on 1 June) appears first and the newest (from Paris on 2 July), appears last. Intensity of reporting from particular places, as measured by the length of the account, could depend on the type of information being conveyed or the level of possible interest among supposed readers. In the example at hand, Naples gets nine lines for a report on grain shipments, whereas La Bassée, in French Flanders, gets 65 lines referring to ongoing events in the French Fronde. News from Chester actually regards the siege of Catherlough (Carlow) by Henry Ireton and his army. Berwick news was about the imminent arrival of Charles II in Scotland for coronation as the successor to the deposed and executed King Charles I, in spite of the refusal by Cromwell and the English Parliament to accept any such accession. Slightly more chaotic was the London Gazette, which we examine in a random number from 3 May 1666 (Table 15.2). Reports again appear to be arranged in the order received, based on the vagaries of the postal system; so we begin with a report on 28 April from the coastal town of Bridlington in Yorkshire, with regard to the sighting of merchant ships on their way to Europe. The next report, from Plymouth on the next day, refers to a ship called The Garland having seized ‘two Dutch prizes’ which had the ill fortune to have gone ‘around Ireland, with ballast bound for Bordeaux’, signifying, for the lucky, a total benefit of some 90–100 tons of goods from each prize. The major news appears to come from the Hague on 7 May, concerning matters in Sweden, where a certain Lord Isbrandes (presumably John Ysbrandts) is acquiring cannon to rearm the Swedish forces (designated ‘our’, as an artefact of the news collection process), plus numerous stories regarding matters in the Netherlands. The weekly Gaceta de Madrid followed a similar pattern, as we see in Table 15.3 based on the 5 January 1700 number. As is evident, relatively succinct reporting on Madrid in this official paper occurs at the end of a recitation of mainly foreign news. In spite of an industry-­wide focus on foreign news in the first half of our period, the potential of printed newspapers to diffuse regime-­ friendly messages was noted early on and became more crucial as military conflicts grew deadlier and more expensive. Already in the first decades of the seventeenth century Paolo Sarpi, in a discussion of the uses of propaganda, toyed with the idea of suggesting a regular government news service for the Venetian republic, before rejecting such a plan on the grounds that any encouragement of public discussion

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Table 15.2  Datelines in the London Gazette, 3 May 1666 Place

Date

Number of lines

Bridlington Plymouth Newcastle Paris Seville Hamburg Vienna Bayonne Venice Ostend Brussels Copenhagen Middlebourg Stockholm Malines (Mechlin) The Hague Ostend (again) Madrid Flushing Harwich Whitehall

28 April 29 April 1 May 8 May 13 April 21 April 17 April 28 April 27 April   9 May (new style)   7 May 20 April 6 May 11 April 9 May 7 May 9 May 24 April 10 May 3 May 6 May

6 8 3 28 15 24 13 16 18 12 9 10 5 4 8 46 8 8 14 15 8

Table 15.3  Datelines in Gaceta de Madrid, 5 January 1700 Place

Date

Number of lines

Warsaw Hamburg Vienna Venice London Paris Ceuta Madrid

28 November 1699 29 November 1699 14 December 1699 30 November 1699   4 December 1699   4 December 1699 25 December 1699   5 January 1700

20 54 44 19 16 15 10 7

could only end badly. Such a rationale began to lose force as time went on and fiscal extractions weighed more heavily on populations, such that the diffusion of regular news soon became a typical activity of state secretariats alongside long-­standing censorship practices in regard to manuscript and print, in an effort to control discussion about how public money went in and out, while inducing compliance

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and awe in an age before the automatic allegiances supplied by nationhood. Indeed, Roger L’Estrange, English press licenser in the 1660s, who echoed Sarpi’s sentiments that any such publication was apt to render the subjects ‘too familiar with the actions and counsels of their superiors’, made an exception for productions carefully crafted by the Restoration government on whose behalf he exercised this function in the Public Intelligencer and Newes which fused into the London Gazette in 1665 (Hill 1985: 33). With the local circumstances prepared by fiscal policies, military conscription, religious differences and general malfeasance at the top, the period’s successive waves of civil unrest gave ample evidence of the deeply disquieting effect of some kinds of news. Gaspare Squarciafico, writing pseudonymously at mid-­century, was only one of many who noted the close connection between international news and rebellion. Of events in Genoa, he asserted, ‘In familiar conversations they discuss the revolt of Naples, the revolutions of Catalonia, the Portuguese plot and the change of government in England and the liberty of Holland all in one breath’ (Squarciafico 1655: 97; Passano 1887: 301). A similar effect of contagion occurred in Naples, where according to Alessandro Giraffi, news regarding elsewhere inspired local action. Once the anti-­ tax protests throughout most of Sicily were seen to have succeeded in persuading the Spanish government there to revise its policy on extraction, the Neapolitan people, said Giraffi, began to organise a protest of their own, which, in response to the government reaction developed into a full-­blown revolt (Giraffi 1647; Dooley 1995: 242). The events in Naples mentioned by Giraffi and Squarciafico were in turn seriously scrutinised by English readers, according to new research compiled by Davide Boerio. While translations of relevant one-­off publications abounded, the London newspapers kept track of events on a regular basis. The Moderate Intelligencer, for instance, run by editor and publisher John Dillingham, often utilising material directly translated from the French Gazette, endeavoured to explain how a modest Neapolitan fishmonger and his associates managed to hold Spanish power suspended for ten days, and his successors for many months more. ‘The great Insurrection’ begun by Masaniello and continued by others ‘to the number of 60000 which are still in armes’, began one account dated 19/29 August 1647, ‘is risen to such an height, as can see but little hope of attonement’. The Viceroy had fled to Castel Nuovo along with ‘the greatest part of the Ministers and Officers of Spain’. Table 15.4 shows the French original and the English translation side by side. The derivation is as unmistakable as is the interest on

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Table 15.4  Paris Gazette story (July 1647), translated in Moderate Intelligencer (August 1647) De Naples, l’11 Iullet 1647    Le grand soulevement commancé le septième de ce mois, par Antonio Massiniello fruitier de cette ville et entretenu depuis ce temps là par les autres habitans qui sont tousjours en armes au nombre de plus de soixante mille, est venu à un tel excez qu’on y voit peu d’espérance d’accommodement: le peuple tenant tousjours assiégé le Duc d’Arcos nostre Viceroy dans Castel-novo, où il s’est réfugie avec le Visitateur Royal, sa famille & la pluspart des Ministres & Officiers du Roy d’Espagne. On dit que le principal auteur de cette émotion est un vieillard âgé de 80 ans, ci-devant favori & principal confident du Duc d’Ossone & qui a ce sujet avoit esté condamné à la mort par les Espagnols en haine de ce Duc mais le Comte d’Olivarez ayant appris qu’il estoit homme de grand esprit empescha l’exécution, & l’ayant fait venir en Espagne le fit seulement reléguer à Orano dans Afrique; où après avoir demeuré vingt ans, son âge caduc lui ayant fait obtenir permission de retourner en cette ville, il a rendu aux Espagnols la pareille du mauvais traitement qu’ils lui avoyent fait souffrir, ayant fomenté cette émotion en laquelle il entretient la bourgeoisie. . .

By the last weeks Post from Paris 10 August.    From Naples the 11th of July The great Insurrection begun in this town by Anthonio Massiniello, a f[r] uicterer, and continued ever since the other inhabitant, to the number of 60000 which are still in armes, is risen to such an height, as can see but little hope of attonement; the people holding the Viceroy still besieged within Castel Novo whereunto he is fled with the royal Visitor, his family and the greatest part of the Ministers and Officers of Spain. ’Tis said that the principal Author of the commotion is a man of 80 years of age, heretofore a favorite and principall Confident, of the Duke of Ossun; and, who for that cause, and in hatred unto that Duke had been by the Spaniards condemned unto death. But the Conde d’Olivares understanding that he was of a great spirit, stayed his execution, and causing him to be brought into Spain, did only bannish him unto Orani in Affrick; where having stayed some 20 years: his fraile age having procured him leave to return unto this town, he had requited the Spaniards ill entertainment of him, in raising and fomenting the said Commotion of the townsmen . . .

[Gazette (Paris), 90, p. 673, de Naples, l’11 Iullet 1647]

[Moderate Intelligencer, 126, 12–19 August 1647, p. 1216, 419.126/E.402(26)]

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both sides of the Channel. A later issue carried a report from Paris dated 16 November, claiming that ‘Letters are come this day, which say the Nepolitans have overcome all the Spaniards in the City of Naples, and with great slaughter.’ Moreover, ‘they have since brake all the Effigies of the Kings of Spain, and put themselves into a Common-­ wealth, have sent for the Duke of Guise to their Generalissimo and chosen the Bishop of Aix their agent at Rome during the War, put to death their general, who was a Neapolitan, and sent his heart to his wife’. The appropriate conclusion would not be lost on an English audience. Since ‘the pretence is oppression, and insolencies of the Spaniard, and that makes wise men mad: let those that have power in other Kingdoms, be warned by this example’ (Moderate Intelligencer, 11–18 November 1647, unpaginated). Meanwhile, other reporting in the same paper covered a decision by the Commons that anyone giving shelter to King Charles, now a fugitive, would face execution and confiscation of all property (Moderate Intelligencer, 11–18 November 1647, 1372). Events in England, to be sure, provided equally strong material for foreign correspondents to elaborate into inspiring homilies on the struggles between rulers and peoples. When the king was finally tried and executed in January 1649, Amerigo Salvetti, writing from London, expressed whatever dismay he could expect to be shared at the Tuscan Grand Ducal court for which he served as a resident. In an anonymous newsletter addressed to these and (as was the custom of this writing genre) a short list of other privileged readers, he lays out the basic course of events, barely stopping short of articulating the affront to honour, dignity and hierarchy. It is confirmed that on the sixth of the current month this new court at Westminster pronounced the death sentence against its king, and on the ninth they had it carried out by the ordinary executioner on a platform built for this purpose, in front of the door of his royal palace in Whitehall, where his majesty suffered the blow with unspeakable courage, extraordinary magnanimity, and to the great astonishment of all who were spectators of such a fatal and tragic spectacle. Next came the account of further procedures of the new ‘people’s republic’, including measures to prevent any attempts to re-­establish the monarchy. They immediately sent a rigorous proclamation to all parts of the kingdom, which forbade anyone, under penalty of death,

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to recognise the prince of Wales [later Charles II] or others as kings of England, without the approval of the war council, and of the Chamber of Commons, both having resolved to reduce the monarchical government into a people’s republic, and to do everything under the name of Custodes libertatis Angliae authoritate Parlamenti; and consequently exclude, as this week they did, the upper chamber of the titled and peers of the kingdom, which represented the third estate of the kingdom, presuming to be able to do so without any opposition, given that they had the weapons and all the fortresses of the kingdom in their hands. Successful exclusion of the Lords from formal decision making, however, was still only half the battle. ‘The common opinion concludes’, he warned, that the new government ‘will not succeed without opposition from the presbyterian faction, who are great enemies of the army and its high-­handed procedures.’ What this might mean remained to be seen. Elsewhere in Europe readers were treated to even more explicit conclusions in the press regarding the same events. Pietro Socini, writer of the Turin newspaper Successi del mondo, proclaimed, ‘The barbarous death of the king of England occurred on the morning of February 9, 1649 on a Tuesday, the day destined to the execrable parricide.’ The specific interpretation passed into every line. ‘The scaffold was prepared before the royal palace in order to heighten the outrage.’ Next came a section suggesting a special role for the diplomatic corps: ‘alarmed about the hasty decision, especially the French ambassador, [they] tried to avoid a tragedy; but they were not even allowed to speak’. Socini gave an ironical thrust to MPs’ reply to the ambassadors, explaining, ‘those gentlemen had other very great fish to fry’. Few of Socini’s readers would have known that his account, including most of the commentary, was practically a word-­for-­word translation of the account by the writers of the Paris Gazette under direction of Cardinal Mazarin. As events occurred in England, a curious Europe received news of the rise of Oliver Cromwell, and their accounts of the next quarter-­ century were often even insightful. By March 1659 the Colonia newspaper (2 May 1659) noted that Richard Cromwell was in serious trouble, since antagonism had resumed between the army and the new Parliament. During the Exclusion Crisis the Napoli paper (3 June 1681) reported King Charles II’s dismay about the new demands of his Fifth Parliament and suggested that if he gave in to the exclusion of the Duke of York the Commons would not stop until they had reduced him

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Figure 15.1  News flows regarding the execution of Charles I, 1649

‘to a private person’. During the Glorious Revolution the Gazzetta di Mantova (10–11 March 1689, report dated ‘Paris, Feb. 18’) noted how George Savile, Lord Halifax, ‘made every effort to turn the government into a republic, although others wanted an elective king as in Poland but depending on the Parliament’. To readers in a kingdom, in a duchy, in a marquisate and even in an old republic, the spectacle of a people finally and definitively determining its form of rule was extraordinary indeed. News networks across Europe depended on a continuously developing web of postal services first constructed for the most part in the sixteenth-­century springtime of territorial states. Distance, as Fernand Braudel pointed out long ago, ‘was the first enemy’; but the enemy was vexed on many fronts by efforts to satisfy the necessities of communication (Braudel 1972: 355; Fedele and Gallenga 1988; North 2000; Behringer 2003). Regular deliveries joined the major hubs by a series of intermediate stops or ‘posts’ where riders could take refreshment and feed or change horses so as to be able to cover four to six such stops, amounting to a total of 75–100 km in a single day. The pioneering Italian manual writer Ottavio Codogno, for instance, counted no fewer than twenty-­three such stops between Lyons and Blois, including ‘the Tower’, the village of Brella, ‘the fountain on the way over the mountain of Tarara’, San Seforin, Rovana, a location ‘at the crossing of the Lovera river’ and so forth (Codogno 1620: 267). Regular services

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Figure 15.2  Major information transit routes c. 1690

might of course be subject to delays caused by weather and military activity, as well as highway robbery, such that ‘The Postman Robbed’ was a famous satire on letter writing as well as on the ubiquitous crime named in the title (Pallavicino [1641] 1984). A map of the principal nodes and edges in this network by the end of the seventeenth century would include a dense web of connections. Amsterdam and Rotterdam were prominent enough to compete with each other as hubs in the Netherlands, from which news and mail arrived in England and Scotland. The road from Brussels to Frankfurt or Augsburg and onward to Trent would be a main feature, branching off towards Venice, Rome and Milan. The route from Cologne to Prague via Frankfurt and Nuremberg would be another main conduit. Each of these major hubs, including Madrid and Seville, was also the centre for a local or regional network, and in these last two cases, for the New World communications that grew increasingly important as the seventeenth century advanced. The relevant article in News Networks in Early Modern Europe points out that, just as in modern rail travel, the shortest route between two places might not be a straight line, as major hubs could necessitate some backtracking, such as, for instance, movement from Florence to Bologna via Venice or

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Milan, or from Genoa to Ancona via Rome or Venice (Schobesberger et al. 2016). Foreign news reporting was only one among various points of contact between England and the continental news centres. Typically, the increasingly widespread daily papers, such as the London Post Boy, included commercial notices of international interest. A number published on 26 December 1719, for instance, reported on the price of stock in the East India Company and Africa and on the pattern of mercantile shipping in and out of North and South America and the Caribbean, as well as to and from certain locations around Europe, with the direction of winds in some cases, and occasional references to the goods being c­ arried – a­ ll relevant to the circulation of information within the emerging economic world system, and a tempting subject for a more intense study on international advertising than has been done to date, in spite of the well-­developed bibliography on specific geographical areas and states (for instance, Feyel 2000; Berg and Clifford 2007). Even in places where public information was powerfully controlled, and commerce, at least in the standard rule books on nobility, was regarded as a derogation from family honour, newspapers eventually followed the pattern of touting goods and services around the globe, seeming to favour the production and circulation of wealth at all social levels. The Diario noticioso published in Madrid from 1758, for instance, introduced the 3 July issue with a sermon-­like admonition that ‘Nothing is more seductive to our credulity than the works of men, and all the more so when these are directed to flatter the hopes we conceive based on outward appearances’, followed (somewhat incongruously) by advertisements for commodities on offer, including (in Calle Santo Thomàs) silver cups inscribed with the life of the Virgin, as well as, in Calle de la Luna, a gaming table and an ‘exquisite’ iron coffer, and other similar information crowding out almost anything else. To be sure, major changes occurred, with varying incisiveness from place to place, regarding the impact of news reading and the expectations coming from this, between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. A study of public expressions of awareness with regard to news events would have to take into account not only literary works drawing on the press, but also phenomena of public reading, by voice or shared copies, widely diffused at the time. Scenes for such reading notoriously included the ubiquitous coffee houses whose newly perceived role gave rise to the notion of a ‘public sphere’, first articulated in theoretical terms by Jürgen Habermas ([1962] 1989), consisting of numerous ordinary people in any given place making public use

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of their reason and intelligence, outside and occasionally in contrast with the official spheres of state and court (Calhoun 1992; Klein 1996; Cowan 2004; Dooley 2011: 1–16; Robertson 2020). First discernible in England (according to this view), such behaviour, associated also with rising literacy and the ever more pressing necessities of the commercial economy, began to spread to France, Germany and elsewhere as the eighteenth century progressed. The Enlightenment movement took many forms, but a common theme was the use of multiple media including periodicals to diffuse messages about reform to an increasingly widespread reading audience (McDowell 2017). Not that newspapers or journalists in general were regarded with any particular deference on the whole. From time to time, and notably around the dawn of the eighteenth century, readers of news were satirised for credulousness, fanaticism and triviality by the likes of Daniel Defoe and Joseph Addison, with the implication that journalists were for the most part unreliable peddlers of assorted undigested notions regarding day-­to-­day matters, an aspect that tended to belie any direct connection between news and knowledge (Pettegree 2018). However, the Enlightenment’s intense commitment to making intellectual activity, and what were regarded as the fruits of reason, relevant to a wider public for the improvement of life and society, by a philosophy attuned to practical matters and emerging problems, necessarily demanded an awareness of current events, acquired by whatever means (Burrows 2002). Test cases for this reasoning were not slow to appear. Perhaps like no previous occurrence, the catastrophic Lisbon earthquake of 1 November 1755 resonated throughout the European media echo chamber and beyond, with significant reverberations in the literary world among the protagonists of the Enlightenment movement (Gould 1999). In many places, shock waves were actually felt so distinctly over land and sea as to raise immediate local concerns even before the nature of the event was fully known. The recently established Western Flying Post based in Sherborne, Dorsetshire, one of many regional titles that flourished in the context of a relative liberation of the press, reported, in several issues beginning on 17 November, ‘a very sensible shock’ felt in Cork, ‘sudden and surprising fluxes’ in Kinsale, and water agitated ‘in a surprising manner’ in Loch Lomond. Meanwhile the first anxious communications occurred within diplomatic circles. Typical of the way in which the more troubling news finally broke was the report in the Dublin Journal issue for 6 December referring in turn to news dated Madrid 10 November, which had appeared in the London Gazette, to the effect that:

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european exchanges, networks and contexts 377 Table 15.5  Diffusion of news about the Lisbon earthquake 22 November, Paris Gazette 28 [AQ] November, Avignon, Le Courrier 25 November, London, The Whitehall Evening Post, 1521, 22–25 November 26 November, The Hague, Hague Current, ‘s-Gravenhaegse Courant 28 November, Cologne, Gazette de Cologne 29 November, Hamburgischer Unparteyischer Correspondent, 190 29 November, Dublin, The Dublin Gazette 5 December, Copenhagen, Danish Post Gazette = Kjøbenhavnske Danske Post-Tidender 6 December, Wienerisches Diarium (the Vienna Daily) ran an Extra-Blatt (extra page) 8 December, Stockholm, Ordinari Post Tijdender 13 December, Cork, The Cork Journal 13 December, Diario Ordinario of Rome 16 December, St. Petersburg News (Sankt-Peterburgskie Vedomosti), 5 December OS 22 December, Boston Evening Post 29 December, New-York Mercury 1 January 1756, Pennsylvania Gazette   8 January 1756, The Maryland Gazette

On the Eighth Instant, a Messenger dispatched by the Secretary of the Spanish Embassy at Lisbon, with Letters of the 4th Instant, brought an Account of the terrible Effects of the Earthquake which happened there, on the 1st, (the same Day we felt it here, but without any considerable damage) between the Hours of Nine and Ten, and which, in five Minutes, destroyed the Palace, Churches, and most of the stately Buildings; and that the Flames were still destroying the Remains of the City, from one Extremity of it to the other, when the Courier came away. As evidence emerged of a disaster of nearly unimaginable proportions swallowing an entire city in a vortex of earth, water and fire, leaving some 50,000 estimated dead (no reliable figures are available even to this day), newspapers from as far away as Russia eventually got hold of the news, more or less in the order described in Table 15.5, based on a recent careful analysis (Molesky 2015: 386–88). The impact on culture and society as the enormity of the disaster began to sink in was such that the whole discussion has long been an important chapter in the history of European literature, philosophy and science. Our concern here is to signal the role in developing an international discourse about news. At the time, those particularly

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concerned to influence the sphere of public discussion attempted to extrapolate from individual experiences in the chain of events to express insights on the purpose of life, the place of human agency and the relation of God to man. Memorable contributions included Voltaire’s influential ‘Poème sur le désastre de Lisbonne’ (‘Poem on the Lisbon Disaster’) published the year following the quake (1756), a prelude to the Enlightenment philosopher’s influential critique of the convenient optimism and abstract idealism of a bygone age, which he later elaborated in the novel Candide (1759). If the cataclysm was a powerful symbol for humanity on the way to a transvaluation of values, revolution was even more so; and events in the last third of the century, on both sides of the Atlantic, brought emerging ideas into sharper focus, while exemplifying the information connectedness of Britain to the wider world. An especially rich theoretical literature has attempted to draw meaningful conclusions regarding the structure of events (Brinton 1965; Skocpol 1979; Tilly 1993; and summing things up, Baker and Edelstein 2015; Buchanan 2017; Coccia 2019). Here we are particularly interested in how concepts of freedom, emancipation, the value of the individual and the responsibility of society, in many guises and interpretations, were entering public discourse and engaging audiences as never before. The relation between ideas and actions is much debated, with some scholarship placing more emphasis on ideology (for instance, Bailyn 1967) or on social forces (for instance, Nash 2005) as the primary cause of revolutionary change, just to name two major interpretations. In any case, ideas no doubt inspired the language used for conveying the significance of events, and events, as interpreted in the news, provided patterns for further action. America for the first time gained widespread attention in the news as the colonial reality appeared to be slipping out of European control, inspiring concerns about tightening discipline on the one hand, and, on the other, capitalising on discontent (Conway 2003: ch. 4). Violent clashes in Lexington and Concord were eventually followed on 4 July 1776 by the signing of a Declaration of Independence, which in turn made reference to recent news stories such as the British use of foreign troops in the build-­up to the conflict. Echoes reached far and wide, corresponding to a lively interest and potentially powerful impact. A study of the press in Germany (Wilke 1995: 71) found that in the Hamburgische unparteyische Correspondent (Hamburg) alone, the relevant material comprised no fewer than 120,000 lines over the period 1773–83, amounting to some 10,000 lines per year. No matter that most information came from London with a 12-­day delay,

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compounded in turn by the three to four weeks necessary for news to arrive in London. In Hamburg as in London, information was eagerly sought from a wide range of sources including private correspondence, handwritten newsletters and colonial papers such as the Quebec Gazette, the Philadelphia Gazette, the Pennsylvania Journal, the New York Gazette and the New Hampshire Gazette, or whatever else could be found and quickly transcribed or translated. In Britain, media coverage of the events in America occurred among a population already predisposed to widespread shifts in attitude and behaviour due to the ongoing involvement in wars with France and Spain. The messages, as numerous studies have emphasised, were somewhat contradictory. Whereas the revolt was roundly condemned by the royal authorities, the rebel general George Washington, having already become something of a media icon in the American press, received high marks for integrity and courage, as Troy Bickham (2009) points out, even in English press accounts. As events unfolded, and the realisation sank in regarding the irredeemable failure of Crown control, the effect on sentiments in Britain, in the view of Linda Colley (1992b), was to determine a turning inward, emphasising a home-­ based British self-­perception. Impact is notoriously tricky to measure, even taking as axiomatic that press coverage of any kind indicates some latent interest among readers due to the entrepreneurs’ rational expectations of a return on investment in media time and material. A study of public expressions of awareness with regard to news events would have to include not only literary and other works drawing on the press, but also phenomena of public reading, by voice or shared copies. Although accurate figures on literacy rates are somewhat elusive, contemporary impressions seemed to evince a considerable diffusion. Joineriana: or the Book of Scraps (London, 1772, 2, 9), states that: The common people, of late years, are become so wonderfully learned among us, by the vast increase of Diurnals and ­Nocturnals – ­Gazettes and ­Gazetteers – ­Papers and ­Packets – ­Journals and ­Ledgers – M ­ ercuries and Flying-­posts – C ­ ourants and C ­ hronicles – ­that you will hardly find the meanest peasant, or the sootiest chimney-­sweeper so unlettered, as not to be able to spell a Newspaper. Expressing the net consequences, perhaps with a somewhat exaggerated tone of irony, a contemporary print entitled A Meeting of the City Politicians (1779) poeticises thus: ‘With staring Eye & open Ear / Each cobling Horned City seer / Swallows down Politics with

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Beer / Neglects his Family & Calling / To enter into Party Brawling / Gets Drunk & Swears-­the Nation’s falling’. If events in America inspired no successful home rebellion in England, in spite of powerful dissident voices against the Hanoverian monarchy among the likes of Richard Price and John Wilkes, echoes abroad added to a revolutionary trend wherever local conditions afforded the likelihood of radical change (Macleod 2019). Expressions of popular discontent, recently catalogued by David Armitage (2007), drove numerous dissident movements around Europe and abroad, from Flanders to Haiti, all duly recorded in the British and Irish press. According to Jonathan Israel (2017), it was this expanding blaze that led directly to the most incisive regime-­changing moments at the end of the century, including, in the words of Edmund Burke (1790: 11), ‘the most astonishing that has hitherto happened in the world’, whereby French events dominated the news in the last decade of the century and well into the next. Already by 1787 French news seemed to be a fixation, for instance, of the London Morning Chronicle. A preliminary sounding yields the results shown in Table 15.6, with reports from Paris and other French cities surpassing by significant amounts the news emanating from other places around Europe and the Atlantic world. To be sure, not all news was political in nature. A fascination with French lifestyles and behaviour inspired reports such as the scandalous story of a clever impostor, extending to three entire columns over two issues, or the Table 15.6  London Morning Chronicle, January 1787 coverage City

Number of lines

City

Number of lines

Paris Vienna The Hague Leghorn New York Stockholm Boston Philadelphia Florence Cracow Constantinople Madrid Cologne Dresden

1075 65 56 46 45 36 35 35 35 30 25 24 24 20

Tunis Marseilles Frankfurt Berlin Ostend Liege Petersburg Madeira Nijmegen Naples Rome Venice Hamburg Tangiers

19 18 16 14 10 10 8 8 8 7 7 6 6 5

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grisly two-­ column description of a prisoner being executed, all of which the reader might supplement with material from a sister paper, the London Chronicle, which ran a regular service on ‘French fashions’. News of the first salient events of 1789 broke in the British press with the usual several days’ delay, adding to the drama and suspense as new events occurred. The Times on Tuesday 15 July, one day after the fall of the Bastille, cited an ‘extraordinary messenger’ having arrived the day before to report that ‘All Paris was in the utmost consternation, and at the time of the Messenger’s leaving that city, the tumult was become so violent, and extended, that orders had been given to draw out the cannon, and every man to stand under arms’ (15 July, 2). However, departure from the city must have occurred several days prior to this, as is also evinced by other news in the report referring to events on the previous Sunday. On Saturday the 18th, the London World was chiming in with more ‘From an Express late last Night’, claiming that ‘the disturbances are further from the hope of adjustment than when the last accounts arrived from hence’, such that indeed, ‘the power of the KING is daily abating’, whereas ‘from hour to hour the Courtly members are decreasing’. Dismissed by the king, ‘the National Assembly continue to sit, and to act’ (London World, 18 July, 2). More intense commotion was noted, with due typographical emphasis, in the Morning Post issue for 18 July: ‘The intelligence received from the Continent yesterday, states, that a vast multitude, amounting to near FORTY THOUSAND PERSONS, have Stationed themselves in the road between PARIS and VERSAILLES, determined to support the popular cause.’ The account went on: ‘It is also said, that a considerable part of PARIS has been destroyed by fire, caused by the citizens, whose zeal seems to bid defiance to all the menaces of the Court.’ Matters in Lyons had become even more critical, with the destruction of the customs house there, and a military intervention ‘having killed about an hundred and fifty persons’. Referring to the ongoing course of things, the editor cautions, ‘These accounts do not flow in our regular channel, and therefore we shall not deem ourselves responsible for the truth of them’, while venturing to suggest a certain probability considering ‘the present state of the French dominions’. Whether within these exciting reports there also appeared the fall of the Bastille is impossible to say, since the event had not yet crystallised into the iconic moment it was later to become. Indeed, such was the power of the French Revolution on the press in Britain and elsewhere that important changes consequently came about in the very structure of the developing industry. Amid demands for a factual basis upon which to ground forecasts and conjectures,

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the Morning Chronicle notably turned away from the widespread practice of textual appropriation and translation with regard to the panoply of spurious press accounts in general circulation around Europe and towards investment in specifically assigned reporters, such as, for instance, James Perry, an editor on assignment in Paris, an example soon followed by The Times (Kristiansen 2018). Not that media concern for sources or for verification would have been particularly new at this time. But the deliberate movement of resources into this area of activity marked an important shift with long-­term consequences. Not only in England but throughout Europe, readers were by turns enthralled and appalled by some of the most attention-­ grabbing events since Martin Luther’s break with Rome nearly three centuries before. The terrible force of an entire people seemingly motivated for political, social and cultural change not only introduced a new element in public life, but also a new emotion with regard to the effort to be informed. According to Heinrich Christian Boie, writing in December 1789, Germany had been inundated with enough writings about it to induce ­nausea . . . ­Like an electric shock emanating from Paris, it affected every nation, its spirit spreading all the way to Dalmatia. Even a people like the Romans, who were so jaded they seemed to have lost any notion of liberty, were excited and felt an urge for a moment to improve their lot. Nowhere was the impact felt more strongly, however, than in Germany. The shock wave hit even the smallest German villages and, as a result of the discontent most people experienced, induced a tendency to rebel. There were probably few states in Germany where no kind of unrest developed. (Boie 1789: 636, trans. Reichardt 2010) Similar sentiments could be found expressed in any number of European countries. As reporting turned to the actions of the National Assembly, including the abolition of feudal rights and eventually the nobility, the Declaration of the Rights of Man, the Civil Constitution of the Clergy, the new constitution of the country, the execution of the king and queen, and other acts, language itself underwent notable changes, with newly problematic meanings being attached to words such as ‘equality’, ‘brotherhood’, ‘liberties’, ‘citizen’, ‘constitution’ and so forth, not only in the original French but in the contrasting interpretations of events and terminology then circulating within the British and Irish public sphere. Indeed, in the view of one study:

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european exchanges, networks and contexts 383 readers were consequently denied the definitional information to challenge the polarised, anti-­revolutionary interpretation of events with which they were presented. ‘Liberty’, ‘equality’, ‘fraternity’, ‘citizen’, ‘constitution’ – on both sides of the ideological divide key political concepts were reduced to empty, one dimensional labels. In this simple, yet effective, manner the revolutionary paradigm was demonised and the British polity canonised. (Jackson 1999: 178)

According to this account, based on a study of the Bristol newspapers, ‘the linguistic impact of the revolution upon Britain may be more usefully thought of as a complex, and sometimes contradictory, process of assimilation, impoverishment, rejection, and transvaluation’. A century and a half of engagement with European and global phenomena by the British and Irish ­press – ­dynamic, concerned, occasionally raucous and i­rreverent – e­ nds on this ambiguous note of hope and horror, just as the mechanical means for stoking such emotions on a still more massive scale were being developed, in what has been called the next great epoch in the printing press after the invention of printing (Kovarik 2011: 67–104). Our conclusion thus opens up on to a wider perspective, with the balance of continuities and discontinuities between the eighteenth century and the next still very much under discussion, then as now (see, for instance, Andress 2015). But a basic working hypothesis of much of the scrutiny remains intact. The need to tell about everyday experience clearly transcends chronological and geographical boundaries, and the basic elements of event narration join epochs and cultures as much as do the structural features of society and government. Is this because the makings of experience, real or imagined, in motion and at rest, are already inevitably laden with human values, as some work suggests (Ricoeur 1984: 57)? That would be matter for a different kind of study than the one presented here. In any case, the exchange of news, in its domestic or international guise, was henceforth guaranteed a permanent, though often controversial, place in the realm of knowledge, as in life.

Chapter Sixteen

TRANSLATION AND THE PRESS Mairi McLaughlin and Nicholas Brownlees

T

his chapter examines the translation of news both into and out of English in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We consider the scope and significance of translation, what we know about the translators, and the kinds of strategies employed as well as their rationale. In his study of early modern translation, Burke succinctly refers to such investigation as ‘Who translates? With what intentions? What? For whom? In what manner? With what consequences?’ (2007: 11). Throughout the period newspapers relied heavily on translation for their coverage of international news. Either the editors or printers translated directly from the source language, or they copied news items from other newspapers, which had themselves either translated the news story or relied in turn on an earlier translation of the news bulletin. The translation and copying of brief news items or entire paragraphs of previously published foreign news was one of the characteristics of the age and considered totally normal. John Adams remarked, when based in Paris in 1783, that ‘no sooner does a paragraph appear in a French, Dutch or English paper, but it is immediately seized on and reprinted in all the others’ (Slauter 2012: 254). Although normal, the practice sometimes proved irksome. For example, in 1719 the editor of the Quintessence des lettres historiques, critiques, politiques, morales et galantes complained that all one had to do in order to launch a new periodical was to ‘piller adroitement ses confrères gazetiers, et, à la faveur d’une traduction, revendre en français ce que d’autres ont déjà débité en flamand’ (Trenard 1969: 149).1 It 1

Our translation: ‘skilfully steal from fellow gazetteers, and, by grace of a translation, sell in French news that had already been diffused in Flemish’.

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Figure 16.1  The interconnectedness of European news is seen in this Express of 6 May 1707. Published in Dublin, it contains information from ‘2 English Pacquets just arriv’d which brought 2 Holland Mails, viz.’ (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin)

was only at the end of the eighteenth century that the more successful newspapers started to base their international news on reports sent back by their own correspondents. In 1791 James Perry, the editor of the Morning Chronicle, travelled to France to send on-­the-­spot reports back to his own newspaper, while in 1807 Henry Crabbe Robinson went to Altona in Holstein as The Times’s correspondent (Barker 2000: 106). The translation of foreign-­printed news was so commonplace that newspapers hardly ever acknowledged that their news was translated. This has proved problematic for historians wishing to analyse how news was translated, but there are signs of progress on this front today; for example, a number of projects and methodologies currently in development will use digital technology and/or statistical methods to identify much more systematically cases of translated news (see, for example, McLaughlin 2022, and the EuroNews project ). The work that has been done so far has determined that in most cases news was translated relatively faithfully. This had consequences at different levels. On the one hand it led to news content that for a modern-­day reader appears downright bizarre. For example, during the Napoleonic Wars the British press carried paragraphs translated from French newspapers describing tales of French bravery and military success (Barker 2000: 105–6). On the other hand, the translations could prove difficult to read since not only could they be clumsily worded, but they might contain information requiring background cultural knowledge of the source culture that the new readers did not have. The predominance of faithful translation strategies reflects the importance of the commercial considerations that drove much news translation. In certain cases, however, other motivations could be present, and the different circumstances and objectives led to some variation in the translation strategies (Brownlees 2018). This investigation draws on primary and secondary materials to shed light on the role of translation in the production, circulation and reception of news in the early history of the periodical press. It combines established and more recent approaches in order to maximise the diversity of the material covered and the insights gained. Some analyses regard one-­to-­one translation while others are based on the analysis of a structured corpus of historical news texts. Together, the illustrations and case studies allow us both to provide a detailed picture of the main features of translated news and also to move towards broader generalisations about the nature and role of news translation in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

Translation of News into English Much of the international news in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-­ century British and Irish press came via translation. The languages from which the news was most often translated were not just the principal European languages of the t­ime – ­French, German, Italian, ­Spanish – ­but also Dutch, particularly in the seventeenth century when the Dutch Republic was such an important news hub (Dahl 1939; Arblaster 2005). The news was either translated directly into English or arrived through an intermediary language. This was frequently the case with news reported in Italian avvisi that was successively published in French journals before being translated into English (Barker 2020: 50). As the recycling of news was common practice, once translated, foreign news dispatches could then find their way into

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the foreign news sections of any number of other English-­language newspapers (Slauter 2012: 269). This was not just characteristic of the British and Irish press but also of the American colonial press. It was only at the end of the eighteenth century that newspaper editors started objecting to other newspapers reprinting their news without acknowledgement or ‘credit’ (Slauter 2012: 271). Translated news generally consisted of dispatches based on paragraphs introduced by a dateline (Slauter 2012). This was the common way of presenting news throughout Europe at the time. In most cases the English-­language newspaper did not expressly indicate that the news was a translation. When it did so, it was sometimes in an address to the reader in the publication’s inaugural issue where the proprietor’s editorial policy and objectives were set out (Brownlees 2015; Bös 2017). In the first issue of the Daily Courant, Britain’s first daily newspaper, the ‘Advertisement’ at the bottom of the page states that the ‘Author has taken Care to be daily furnish’d with all that comes from Abroad in any Language’ (11 March 1702). In that first issue the Daily Courant states that the translated news items had come from the Harlem Courant, the Amsterdam Courant and the Gazette de France, known as the Paris Gazette in English at the time. The editor is creating here an image of a workplace in which they scour the foreign press and translate what is most newsworthy. In the selection process the editor would have been able to see the length of the original piece and could decide on that basis how much of the news item should be translated so as to fit the space in their own publication (Slauter 2012: 271). Selecting news could depend as much on how much space was left on the page as on the news value of the foreign-­language bulletin itself. In the following address to the reader, the editor of an English news pamphlet explicitly acknowledges what would have been common practice in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: ‘Because the Printer shewed us a blancke page at the end, we therefore haue filled it up with forraine relations which are nothing to the continuation of our discourse’ (A continuation of more newes from the Palatinate, 13 June 1622). This editorial comment is a useful reminder that news does not exist in its own right; an event only becomes news once it is communicated, and in the early modern period its communication could depend as much on production issues such as the need to fill blank space as anything else (Brownlees 2014: 140–1). The editor of the Daily Courant did not state who translated the news, but one can presume that translation was part of the editorial skill set (Slauter 2012: 272). Most editors would have had a working

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knowledge of French, and in the case of the Post Boy readers were even more fortunate, since between 1705 and 1710 the editor was bilingual. Abel Boyer was born and spent his formative years in France before moving to England in 1689. Boyer’s contemporary, John Dunton, lavished praise on his knowledge of French: It is no small recommendation of the Post Boy, to tell the world that the ingenious Boyer writes it. The bare naming the Author is a Panegyrick upon this Paper; for it is that Boyer who writes and translates like the famous L’Estrange. Mr Boyer is the greatest Master of the French Tongue (witness his ‘French Grammar’ and ‘French Dictionary’) . . . (Dunton [1705] 1818: 432) However, Boyer would also have had a useful knowledge of Dutch since from the end of 1685 to 1689 he lived in the Netherlands (Gibbs 2004). In short, he had knowledge of key languages for news translation at that time. The other news writer and translator mentioned above by Dunton is Sir Roger L’Estrange, the royalist, pamphleteer and political journalist (Love 2007). Whatever his knowledge of French before fleeing to the Continent in 1648, L’Estrange would have had occasion to perfect the language during his five years’ exile there. L’Estrange stands out as a translator of news who also produced literary translations from French, Spanish and Latin into English. His knowledge of French and Spanish would have been particularly useful in his editorship of the post-­Restoration newspapers the Intelligencer (1663–66) and the Newes (1663), although no studies have investigated whether his translation of news differed from his approach to the translation of literature, which was criticised at the time for being ‘unfaithful to the tone and dignity of their originals’ (Love 2007: 10). Another well-­known writer, journalist and pamphleteer to work in the translation of news was Daniel Defoe. In 1717 he offered his services to Nathaniel Mist as a translator of foreign news in Mist’s Weekly Journal, a notorious Tory publication (Backscheider 1989: 430–3; Valdeón 2012: 852). We do not know exactly which pieces Defoe translated, but unsurprisingly, given his proclivity for falling foul of the law, in late 1718 he had to defend himself against accusations of writing a libellous piece in the journal relating to home affairs. In his defence Defoe admitted translating foreign newspapers but never ‘meddling with’ the domestic news (Backscheider 1989: 433). The implication was that the translation of foreign news was less politically sensitive than writing on domestic matters, something also true of France and other European countries in this period.

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translation and the press 389 Boyer, L’Estrange and Defoe were all well known in their own right but, as is usually the case with translators of non-­literary texts past and present, most translators of news never escaped anonymity. We know little of the jobbing translators of which most of the daily publications and thrice-­weeklies made use to provide translations of both print news and correspondence. We can presume that their primary motivation was financial, and when occasion required they might offer their services to more than one newspaper. This, at least, is what emerges from a petition dating probably from the late 1720s in which Stephen Whatley claimed that the deteriorating circumstances of the Flying Post had forced him ‘to the Drudgery of Translating for two or three other Publick Papers as well as his own’ (Harris 1987: 229, n. 38). The contrast between translators whose names are known to us today and the anonymous rank and file translators reminds us of the variety of the positions from which individuals were translating the news. It is hard to imagine that such variety did not lead to diversity in the translation strategies they employed, according to such factors as their knowledge of other languages, their own political leanings and their closeness to the centres of power. Although much foreign news was translated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, it is also true that the multilingual reality of London meant that many people in the capital could read the original texts (Barker 2020). Evidence of this is particularly clear in the corantos and newsbooks. For example, A Relation of the late horrible treason (19 February 1623) and The Continuation of our Weekly Newes (14 March 1631) included not just the English translation but also the original Dutch and French texts. The inclusion of occasional French texts is also found outside London in the eighteenth century. The Caledonian Mercury of 27 July 1761 included a 15-­line letter in French followed by its English translation, while the Scots Magazine inverted the order with first the English translation followed by the French source text in ‘an opposite column’ (1 March 1762). Latin, as a European lingua franca alongside French, was also sometimes included with its English translation. For example, Mercurius Politicus (5–12 March 1657) published, with its English translation, the original Latin letter and its ‘Postscript in Cifris scriptum’ (postscript in code) from the Prince of Transylvania to the King of Sweden. The inclusion of both source and target texts would suggest that some readers were capable of assessing the accuracy of the translation. This at least could have been the editorial rationale for the inclusion of both versions. The recognition on the readers’ part of the faithfulness of the translation in that particular issue would lead them to believe that all

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t­ranslations – ­even those when the original text was not i­ncluded – ­would be reliable and accurate too. Latin was also employed, though without a translation, in the Dublin Journal’s reporting of Sir Robert Walpole’s fall in 1742. Introducing Walpole’s 20-­line resignation letter in Latin, the newspaper underlines the sensational nature of the news, no doubt counting on the use of the prestige language to authenticate the extraordinary news story: We have been favour’d with the following Copy of a remarkable Quietus, or Patent of Dismission, divesting a great Minister of his high Employment which he enjoy’d for above 20 Years, under two Kings. As it is very singular, not to be parallel’d by any thing in History, we doubt not, so uncommon a Curiosity will be at this Time acceptable to our Readers, who may be assur’d that it is genuine. (20 February 1742) The need for editorial credibility also explains why on occasion the editor cum translator drew attention to translation deficiencies in other publications. In the following passage, it is not so much the editor pointing out a translation error in another publication that is significant but the subtext of such an affirmation. this Translation which pretends to be faithfully done according to the Dutch Copie omits one main and principal Clause immediately following, which remains in the Original, under the broad Seal of that Country, which is this [Salvis etiam alterutrius pariter reipub. legibus &c; statutis omnibus; that is to say, Saving all the Laws and Statutes of either Common-­wealth respectively.] This should have been added in this Article, but the Translator (for what reason I know not) thought fit to omit it. Therefore it will be best for the Reader to see the true Copie, now printed by his Highness Printers, and not trust a Pamphlet that is set forth without any name to own it. (Mercurius Politicus, 203, 27 April–4 May 1654, 3459) What is being implicitly communicated is that in its reporting of foreign news, Mercurius Politicus is entirely reliable since its editor has the requisite linguistic skills and translation expertise to provide accurate translations. Although the translator is not accused of intentional mistranslation here, elsewhere translation is identified as being part of a dirty tricks campaign in the highly factionalised party politics of the early eighteenth century (Harris 1987: 159). With his customary journalistic verve, Defoe describes how party pieces were planted in foreign

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translation and the press 391 newspapers only to be translated back into English in the Daily Courant, the process of translation enhancing the credibility of the fake news: the Truth is something plain, that this Story is not a Foreign Lie, but an English Lie put into a Foreign Language; and to Translate it, is but restoring the Lie to its Original, the author of the Daily Courant . . . such Stories are willfully put, as are Calculated to serve a Hot-­Headed Party Interest, presuming that the Daily Courant will be the Faithful Translator, and hand it about in English to the World. (The Little Review, 11 July 1705) Whether true or not in this particular instance, the claims being made are revealing in themselves and support a number of the generalisations being made in this chapter about historical news translation. The idea that news can be laundered through translation in this way relies on three things: first, that translation is at the heart of the production and circulation of news, secondly that it generally goes unacknowledged, and thirdly that it is generally carried out in a faithful manner. As regards translation strategies, on the few occasions on which they are explicitly mentioned the editor refers to the translation as being ‘literal’. For example, the Caledonian Mercury informed its readers that its translation of a French envoy’s letter to Britain’s king was ‘translated as literal as possible’ so that ‘no true Briton will read it without the deepest Concern to see his Soverein so greatly affronted by Directions from the French Court’ (27 October 1741). Where no specific translation strategy is indicated, the several case studies that have been carried out on the translation into English of 1620s Dutch corantos have indicated that for the most part the English translators followed the source text closely (Dahl 1952: 35, 36; Brownlees 2011: 36–8). In general, what is not translated in corantos is the British-­related information, since the state had variously structured and intermittently enforced regulations preventing the reporting of domestic affairs (Clegg 2001; McElligott 2005: 89–90). These case studies have been facilitated by the possibility of not only clearly identifying the source Dutch text but also knowing that the English corantos in question could not have taken the information from any other English-­language print publication, since the publishers of English corantos had a news monopoly. As it is therefore easier to analyse translation strategies in periods of a news monopoly, fruitful periods for such analysis are between 1655 and 1659, when Nedham’s Mercurius Politicus and the Publick Intelligencer were the sole periodical English-­language publications, and between 1665 and

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1695, when for much of the time the bi-weekly London Gazette was the sole newspaper. For this reason the selected passages below from the Gazette de France and Mercurius Politicus are interesting. The source text regards news from Paris of 17 March 1657, forming in all two and a half pages of the original quarto publication. The English publication has a similar dateline with two quarto pages of news from Paris, though only some of the news directly relates to and is a translation of the French original. This therefore suggests that while the Gazette de France was employed as a source of news it was not the only source upon which news regarding France was based, other sources being, for example, private and diplomatic correspondence. Table 16.1 presents parts of the two publications that directly correspond to one another. What is clear is that although most of the Gazette de France is closely translated, there are also some significant differences. These regard content omission, addition and small important changes in address terms regarding Oliver Cromwell’s ambassador to France, Sir William Lockhart. The content omission regards the lines ‘la Reyne s’y estant trouvée avec la Comtesse de Soissons, & grand nombre de Seigneurs & Dames de la Cour’ of Gazette de France, which are not translated in Mercurius Politicus. The omission can be considered an example of what translation scholars refer to as domestication, where, as frequently occurs today, the translator (or editor) decides that for their own audience the item is not sufficiently newsworthy to merit translation (Bielsa and Bassnett 2009: 62–73). What instead is definitely considered newsworthy is the report on the English ambassador’s movements in Paris. These are translated in full though with some significant differences regarding the status accorded to the ambassador. In the Gazette de France he is addressed as ‘Colonel Lockard Ambassadeur d’Angleterre’, while in the English newsbook he is referred to as ‘Sir William Lockhart, Lord Ambassador of his Highness of England’ and ‘the Lord Lockhart’. In Mercurius Politicus what is therefore emphasised is not the ambassador’s military title, but his honorary and aristocratic titles of ‘Sir’ and ‘Lord’. We cannot be entirely sure why Mercurius Politicus underlined the English ambassador’s social rank, but it may be related to the important additional information the English newsbook supplies regarding the ambassador. Mercurius Politicus writes that he is ‘Lord Ambassador of his Highness of England’, the latter title clearly referring to Oliver Cromwell, who as Lord Protector was addressed as ‘His Highness of England’. The translator is therefore seemingly using the potential of translation to underline two important details about the

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translation and the press 393 Table 16.1  Omissions in the English translation in Mercurius Politicus of English news in Gazette de France De Paris, le 17 Mars 1657.

From Paris, March 17 stilo novo.

. . .

. . .

Le 12, Sa Majesté continüa ses divertissemens de la Chasse, dans le Bois de Bologne: & le lendemain, à Vincennes.

On the 12, the King went a hunting in the Wood of Bologne, and the next day at Vincennes.

Le 14, le Roy fit encor faire l’Exercice dans le Iardin du Louvre, à sa Compagnie de Mousquetaires, qui avoyent en teste le Sieur de Mancini leur Capitaine Lieutenant: la Reyne s’y estant trouvée avec la Comtesse de Soissons, & grand nombre de Seigneurs & Dames de la Cour.

On the 14, the King was at exercise with his Company of Musqueteers in the Louvre garden, of whom the Sieur Manchini, the Cardinals Nephew, is Captain-Lieutenant.

Le mesme jour, le Colonel Lockard Ambassadeur d’Angleterre, ayant esté receu a S. Denys, dans les carrosses de Leurs Majestez, par le Mareschal d’Estampes & le Comte de Brûlon fit sur le soir, son Entrée en cette ville, avec vn fort beau Cortége d’autres carrosses des Ambassadeurs qui sont ici, & de plusieurs Personnes de marque . . .

The same day, Sir William Lockhart, Lord Ambassador of his Highness of England, having been received at St. Dennis in the Coaches of their Majesties, and by the Marshall D’Estampes, and by the Count of Brulon Introductor of Ambassadors, made his entrance into this City about Evening with a gallant Traine of other Coaches of Ambassadors residing here, and of many other great persons. . . .

Le mesme jour d’hier, les Comtes de Lilebone & de Brûlon, qui avoyent esté prendre en son Hostel, le Colonel Lockard Ambassadeur d’Angleterre, l’amenérent, dans les carrosses de Leurs Majestez, au Louvre: & passans au milieu du Régiment des Gardes & des cent Suisses rangez en haye, il fut introduit à l’Audiance du Roy, dans la Chambre de Sa Majesté: puis à celle de la Reyne: où il receut tous les honneurs & marques possibles d’estime & de bien veillance.

Yesterday, the Lord Lockhart had Audience, being received at his house by the Counts of Lislebone and Brulon, who brought him in their Majesties Coaches to the Louvre. He passed through the Regiment of Guards, and the hundred Switzers ranked in order, to his Audience in the Kings Chambers, afterward to the Queens, being received by both, with all possible demonstrations of honor and good affections.

(Gazette de France, 33, 1657, 262–4)

(Mercurius Politicus, 353, 12–19 March 1657, 7670–1)

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ambassador and Cromwell. First, England is being represented by a man of high social rank, and secondly, England’s Lord Protector is formally addressed as ‘his Highness of England’. The English revolution is over, aristocratic titles and the figure of a king predominate once more. The editor’s desire to emphasise the ambassador’s high status in the eyes of the French can also explain why the last lines in the Gazette de France are translated in full. Here, as in the use of address terms, we see translation as a political act. Every single detail in the French publication underlining their Court’s high regard for the English ambassador is included in Mercurius Politicus.

Translation of News from English into French Just as British and Irish newspapers published news translated from other languages, newspapers published in French also contained translated news. This section explores the translation of news from English for French-­language newspapers published both in France and elsewhere. The inclusion of newspapers published outside France reflects the importance of the extraterritorial French press which developed from the late 1670s onwards. Titles such as the Gazette d’Amsterdam and the Gazette de Leyde had a wide readership that included Huguenots who had fled persecution in France, readers in France where such titles circulated unofficially, and a non-­negligible portion of the social elite across Europe who spoke French (Kraemer 1995: 15–35). News translated from English was an important component of French-­language periodical news in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, with English-­language news covering not just Britain and Ireland but also, especially in the second half of the eighteenth century, North America. Scholars have drawn attention to the role played by French as the de facto international language of the media in the eighteenth century (Kraemer 1995: 15–18; Peacey 2017b: 245). This makes it particularly interesting to explore the translation of news from English into French, since French translations may well have gone on to serve as new source texts for news items published in other languages. Many of the answers given to Burke’s (2007: 11) questions in the previous section also apply to translated news in French. At the highest level, news translation is characterised by the same general ubiquity and invisibility that it has today (Bielsa 2019: 367) and it is only in a small set of specific contexts that the fact of translation is recognised. Some of this can be illustrated if we take as an example the nine

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translation and the press 395 editions of the Gazette d’Amsterdam – arguably the most important extraterritorial French newspaper in pre-­Revolutionary France (Rétat 2001) – that were published in the month of January 1782. These editions were transcribed in their entirety in the context of a project on the language of the historical French press (McLaughlin 2021). This makes it possible to carry out plain text searches to identify moments when translation is discussed. The noun traduction (‘translation’) appears just twice across the total of 183,892 words that these editions represent; the noun itself is thus far less frequent than actual translated news. In one case, it is used to present explicitly as a translation a Circular Letter from Florence. De FLORENCE le 23 Décembre. Il vient de paraître une Lettre Circulaire, en date du 7 de ce mois: Elle contient des Ordres de Mgr. le Grand-­Duc, envoyés par Mr. le Sénateur, Sécrétaire d’Etat, à tous les Juges du Grand-­Duché de Toscane. En voici la Traduction.2 (Gazette d’Amsterdam, 8 January 1782) In this case, as in many others, no information is given about the translation: the reader knows that it is a translation, but is told nothing of the who, where, why and how. The second instance in which traduction appears in the Gazette d’Amsterdam in January 1782 is where the question of translation quality is raised. On this occasion, the newspaper prints a new translation of a Royal Declaration. D’AMSTERDAM le 3 Janvier. La Traduction Authentique faite à Berlin par l’ordre du Roi, de la Déclaration de S. M. Prussienne du 8 Décembre dernier, nous étant parvenue par une voie très respectable, nous avons jugé à propos de la publier, d’autant plus qu’elle differe à quelques égards de celle que nous avons insérée dans notre Feuille du 18 du mois dernier.3 (Gazette d’Amsterdam, 4 January 1782)

2

Our translation: ‘From Florence the 23rd of December. A Circular Letter has just been published, dated the 7th of this month: It contains Orders from Mgr. the Grand-­Duke, sent by Mr. Senator, Secretary of State, to all the Judges of the Grand Duchy of Tuscany. Here is its Translation.’ 3 Our translation: ‘From AMSTERDAM the 3rd of January. The Authentic Translation done in Berlin by order of the King, of His Royal Prussian Highness’s Declaration of the 8th of last December, having come to us through a very respectable channel, we judged it appropriate to publish it, especially since it differs in some respects from the one which we included in our Sheet from the 18th of last month.’

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The opening of the dispatch makes it clear that this new translation is to replace the previous one printed by the same gazette: it is called the ‘Authentic Translation’, it came to them ‘through a very respectable channel’, and it ‘differs in some respects’ from the earlier translation. Such explicit commentary on the newspaper’s own journalistic and editorial ­practice – ­of which translation was naturally a ­part – ­is very rare in gazettes (McLaughlin 2021: 93–4, 97–9), something that contributes to the general invisibility of translation in the historical press. The reproduction of what is explicitly presented as a new, more authoritative translation will have no doubt helped construct an image of the Gazette d’Amsterdam as a reliable source of information, a key attribute in the period just before the Revolution of 1789 when readers had access to multiple competing sources of news (Gough 1988: ch. 1). Finally, the verb traduire (‘to translate’) is used in its linguistic sense on just one occasion in the Gazette d’Amsterdam in January 1782. It appears in a letter published as part of a dispatch from London. The letter is from ‘St. Christophe’, the West Indies island known today as Saint Kitts, and it details concern that the French will soon try to capture this island as they did Saint Eustasius in November 1781. The letter-­writer indicates that the island’s governor, Charles Chabert, sent ‘un Parlementaire avec une Lettre écrite en Hollandais, que Personne ici ne put traduire’ (Gazette d’Amsterdam, 22 January 1782).4 There are several interesting things about this example. First, it shows that people received ­news – ­here manuscript correspondence, but presumably the same thing happened with ­print – ­that they were not able to access because of a linguistic barrier. This is not in itself surprising, but it goes against the general current of scholarship today which highlights the porosity of national and linguistic boundaries in the early modern press (Raymond and Moxham 2016). It suggests that the ease with which news and information were able to flow across borders in Europe was not paralleled elsewhere in the world, not even in the colonised territories of some of the main players in the eighteenth-­ century press such as the French, the British and the Dutch. Secondly, this example stands out because it is not the translated content that is the news but the fact of the absence of translation. Instances in which translation (or its absence) constitutes the news are relatively rare in the historical press, as they are today, but the increasing availability of digitised editions of historical newspapers and periodicals should make it easier to identify such examples in the future. 4

Our translation: ‘a Parliamentarian with a Letter written in Dutch that no One here could translate’.

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translation and the press 397 Aside from these rare instances in which individual news items are presented as translations, there are also individual periodicals whose explicit purpose was to publish translated news. In fact, a number of periodicals in the eighteenth century were specifically devoted to the publication of news translated from the English-­language press. Chouillet and Fabre (1988: 181) highlight how exceptional this is: not only was there no such body of periodicals for any other language or country, but this interest in the English-­language press among French-­ speakers was not mirrored by any equivalent interest in the French-­ language press among speakers of English. Multiple factors explain the important and lasting interest in the English-­language press. It certainly reflects the fact that Britain and France were involved in conflict on a number of occasions over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In his magisterial study of the Gazette de France, Haffemayer (2002: 152–3) highlights its sustained coverage of the English Civil War (1642–51). He calculates that between the years 1647 and 1663, England was the fourth most common source of news, representing 9.6 per cent of all the news published by the Gazette de France. Later on in the period, first the Seven Years War (1756–63) and then the American War of Independence (1775–83) also led to an increased interest in news from the Anglophone world (Chouillet and Fabre 1988: 180). Interest in English news can also be understood more broadly as part of a general Anglomania in eighteenth-­century France that saw, among other things, increasing enthusiasm for English philosophy, literature and experimental science. The press itself appears to have been affected by this because, at least in some quarters, English journalistic writing was seen as a model to imitate. This is clearly illustrated by an example from the first French provincial daily, the Journal de Guienne, where translations of two news stories from England are introduced by a comment about English newspapers being more cheerful than their French counterparts (Merrett 2002: 188). However, Haffemayer (2002: 157) points out that this interest in all things English pre-­ dates the Anglomania of the eighteenth century. He explains that the eighteenth-­century passion for English literature was preceded in the seventeenth century by ‘une passion politique des élites françaises pour l’actualité anglaise, qui remonte à la guerre civile et aux débats entre la royauté et les parlementaires sur la nature du pouvoir monarchique’.5 5

Our translation: ‘a political passion among the French elite for English news, which dates back to the Civil War and to debates between royalists and parliamentarians about the nature of monarchic power’.

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In general, however, it is clear that translated news presented as such was just the tip of the iceberg and, as in Britain and Ireland, we can suppose that a large proportion of the international news published in French had been translated from other languages. Historians have consistently highlighted the centrality of translation in the production and circulation of periodical news in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (on the Gazette de France, see Feyel 1999: 15–16; 2000: 182–3, 187–8). But, as is the case for Britain and Ireland, we know rather little about the individuals who were responsible for translating news. Just a few of the presumed hordes of anonymous news translators operating over the course of these two centuries stand out. The best-­known example is Jean Epstein, a man of German origin who ran what basically amounted to a news translation agency in Paris in the early to mid-­decades of the seventeenth century (Feyel 2000: 138). Epstein is known for translating news from German and Dutch periodicals for the Nouvelles ordinaires de divers endroicts, which he founded and ran in 1631. After some complex legal wrangling, the Nouvelles ordinaires was acquired by the Gazette de France. From November 1631 until December 1682, editions of the Gazette de France were made up of two separate sections called the Gazette and the Nouvelles ordinaires, sometimes also accompanied by a supplement (Feyel 1999: 16). Feyel (2015–21) reproduces the notary deed that Epstein signed with a printer and bookseller in 1631. It offers a partial glimpse of the role of a news translator in the period. Epstein agreed to have the gazettes brought from Germany every week and to translate ­them – ­or perhaps have them t­ranslated – i­nto French by noon on a Thursday. He would then help in the printing and editing of the translated news so that the paper could be distributed early on Friday. Like news translators today who are sometimes dubbed ‘trans-­editors’ (Schäffner 2012), Epstein’s activities involved both journalism and translation, and he also worked under the strict temporal constraints imposed by periodicity. Interestingly, the fact that the two sections of the Gazette de France were produced independently of each other meant that a single edition could include two different dispatches from London, one in each section. This can be illustrated by examining all of the editions of the Gazette de France published in January 1632, also fully transcribed in the context of McLaughlin’s (2021) project. Table 16.2 provides a complete list of all of the dispatches from London published in the Gazette de France in January 1632. It shows that the editions published on 16, 23 and 30 January 1632 all contained two dispatches from London, one in the Gazette and one in the Nouvelles ordinaires. It is interesting

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translation and the press 399 Table 16.2  Dispatches from London in the Gazette de France, January 1632 Date 2 January 1632

Section

Dispatch

Gazette

De Londres ce 28. dudit mois de Decemb.1631. De Londres le 5. de Ianvier 1632. De Londres le 5. dudit mois de Janvier dudit an 1632 De Londres le 10. dudit mois de Ianvier 1632 De Londres le 10. dudit mois de Janvier 1632 De Londres le 20. dudit mois de Ianvier 1632 De Londres le 18. dudit mois de Janvier 1632

16 January 1632 16 January 1632

Gazette Nouvelles ordinaires

23 January 1632

Gazette

23 January 1632

Nouvelles ordinaires

30 January 1632

Gazette

30 January 1632

Nouvelles ordinaires

to note in passing that the datelines capture systematic linguistic variation in the Gazette de France, which sees the Nouvelles ordinaires pattern more closely with the norms of Dutch rather than French printers: upper-­case ‘I’ is used in the Gazette where ‘J’ is used in the Nouvelles ordinaires (McLaughlin 2021: 275–7). Table 16.2 also indicates that sustained interest in news from Britain and Ireland pre-­dated the English Civil War. It is interesting to note the similarity in the timeline: there is a gap of between ten and thirteen days between the date of the original dispatch and its appearance in the Gazette de France, whether it appears in the Gazette or in the Nouvelles ordinaires. This similarity reflects the general circuit described by Haffemayer (2002: 158–9): ‘Londres centralise tous les envois, avant de les faire parvenir à Douvres, où un service de “paquebots” (ou “paquet-boot”) assure la liaison avec la France et les Pays-Bas’.6 It is important to note that although the news came through London, the news events themselves covered a wider geographical spread. This is illustrated by the following dispatch from London dated 10 January 1632: Tout le mal qu’on a faict aux Religieuses d’Irlande est de les avoir empeschées de continüer l’edifice de leur Convent, & deffendu 6

Our translation: ‘London centralises all of the items, before sending them to Dover, where a “packetboat” service is responsible for their transport to France and the Netherlands.’

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de se retirer plus de deux ensemble pour éviter les intelligences dont les soupçonnoient ceux à qui tous les progrez de la religion Catholique deplaisent en ce païs là.7 (Gazette de France, Nouvelles ordinaires, 23 January 1632) This aligns with the general picture that Haffemayer (2002: 153) paints of the news from England in the Gazette de France in the mid-­ seventeenth century. He lists some of the diverse actors and institutions whose activites were reported on, including ‘les insurgés irlandais, les Ecossais, le parlement d’Edimbourg, celui de Londres, l’armée, le peuple de Londres etc.’8 We have not been able to identify the source of this particular news dispatch. It does not come from an English coranto because they tended to avoid printing news about Britain and Ireland in this period of relatively tight control over the press (Boys 2011: 123–49). Instead, it was either translated from a pamphlet or a Dutch coranto, or it could have come through diplomatic or private correspondence. As well as illustrating the way that news from across Britain and Ireland was funnelled through London, then, this example also draws our attention to the diversity of types of sources that lie behind a translated news text. When it comes to the translation of news from English into French, one of the most interesting figures of the period is Edme Jacques Genet. Having spent time as a young man in both Germany and England, Genet was appointed as a secretary interpreter at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs in 1753. As Chouillet and Fabre (1988: 183) explain, the role of secretary interpreters was to translate manuscript news, reports from spies and foreign gazettes into French. It is interesting to note that periodical news was translated in this context alongside these two other types of information because it underscores the political functions of news translation, which clearly served the administration rather than the people. In fact, Chouillet and Fabre (1988: 184) highlight how valuable translated news from English was for the royal administration, because it was far more reliable than spy reports. Genet went on to become head of the Office of Interpreters and made his mark on the institution by adding a language school, a

7

Our translation: ‘All of the wrong that has been done to Irish Nuns is that they have been prevented from continuing to build their Convent, and have been forbidden from retreating together in numbers greater than two in order to avoid them sharing information, something which they were suspected of doing by those in that country who were displeased by all of the progress made by the Catholic religion.’ 8 Our translation: ‘Irish rebels, the Scots, the parliament in Edinburgh, the parliament in London, the army, the people of London etc.’

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translation and the press 401 documentation centre and what might be thought of as a news agency (Chouillet and Fabre 1988: 183). Genet was personally responsible for the translation of news from English, which he carried out so effectively that we can think of him as a central node in the circulation of English news in French in the mid to late eighteenth century. During times of conflict with England when the stakes were higher, Genet was charged with running a series of periodicals that presented English news in translation. During the Seven Years War, he ran first the État politique actuel de l’Angleterre (1757–59) and then a weekly periodical published under various titles (Papiers anglais, État actuel et politique de l’Angleterre and then Gazettes et papiers anglais, all published between 1760 and 1762). As Fabre (2015–21) explains, the selection of items included in the État politique actuel de l’Angleterre was carried out in order to paint England in a very negative light. Genet’s services were put to similar use during the American War of Independence when he published the Affaires de l’Angleterre et de l’Amérique (1776– 79), which lent support to the American Confederate States against the British. For Chouillet and Fabre (1988: 183), Genet’s activities as news editor and translator constitute a clear case of brainwashing and propaganda. In his study of the French press from 1630 to 1788, Feyel (2000: 188) highlights how valuable it would be to compare individual publications in order to identify types of editorial intervention and the various political purposes they served. Such comparisons also shed light on the presence and features of news translation, as was seen with the example from the Gazette de France discussed in the previous section. The digitisation of historical newspapers and periodicals that is taking place today will be transformative in this sense, since it will facilitate the comparison of individual publications using digital tools at scale. For now, McLaughlin’s (2015; 2016; 2021) work on the language of the historical French press occupies a kind of middle ground between comparisons of individual news items and large-­ scale analyses of multilingual corpora of historical newspapers. McLaughlin’s work is based on a medium-­sized corpus of core generalist newspapers and periodicals published between 1631 and 1789: in total, the corpus contains c. 550,000 words of which c. 400,000 have been transcribed (McLaughlin 2021: 21–36). At the most general level, the series of studies have drawn attention to the importance of translation in the production and circulation of news in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. More particularly, the tools of corpus linguistics and corpus-­ based translation studies have allowed some of the linguistic features of translated news to be revealed at a range of different levels.

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At the level of the text, comparisons of the two sections of the Gazette de France have led to the suggestion that translated news was more concise than originally produced news (Haffemayer 2002: 212; McLaughlin 2016: 210–11; 2021: 326). The assumption is that the process of translation had the effect of adding an editorial layer in which information or details judged unnecessary for the new reader could be removed and in which the text could be shortened, an important opportunity in a period when linguistic economy was just as much a value of newswriting as it is today (McLaughlin 2021: 133–42). There is also evidence of linguistic features of the source dispatches appearing in translated news. At the level of syntax, McLaughlin (2021: 177– 80) discovered that passive constructions are more frequent in news dispatches from the Anglophone world than in news from elsewhere in both the Gazette de France and the Gazette d’Amsterdam. Passive constructions are twice as frequent in news from England in the Gazette de France in January 1632, and their frequency increases by almost 50 per cent in the Gazette d’Amsterdam in 1707 (McLaughlin 2021: 179). The reason for this, we can assume, is that as passive constructions are more common in English than in French, they end up being over-­ represented in the translations of English news. A similar effect is seen at the level of vocabulary: borrowed words are slightly more frequent in translated news than in originally produced news (McLaughlin 2021: 324–35). Finally, it appears that the process of translation affected the stylistic level. In the Gazette d’Amsterdam in 1782, for example, news from England differs from news from everywhere else because of features such as a higher frequency of first- and second-­person pronouns, more features typical of speech, and more emotively charged vocabulary. These stylistic features may well be part of the cheerfulness of the language of the English press that some French news writers wished to emulate in the late eighteenth century. This highlights the role of news translation in the development of journalistic style in general (McLaughlin 2021: 335). Just as Raymond and Moxham (2016: 15) have urged us to understand the news system as ‘an essentially international phenomenon’ with local manifestations effecting ‘only local and relatively minor variations’, we may also want to understand journalistic style in the same vein as an international phenomenon with only minor local variations. The translation of news played an integral part in the elaboration of journalistic style and the conventions of the genre across linguistic borders in the early history of the periodical press. Taken together, the patterns emerging from McLaughlin’s corpus-­ based research speak to the relative fidelity of news translation in the

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case study 13 : gazette de londres 403 seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, since specific features are less likely to be carried over from one language to the other when the translation strategy is more free. The patterns also suggest that translated news in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries contained textual-­ linguistic features that distinguished it from non-­ translated news, even if those differences can be hard to spot through manual reading alone. Finally, the patterns are consistent with what we know about news translation today. For example, McLaughlin (2011: 21, ch. 3) found that news dispatches translated from English into French by an international news agency in 2005 were both shorter than their originals and also contained more tokens of the passive than expected. The fact that the patterns align over time indicates that there is a certain amount of historical stability in this specialist form of translation.

Conclusion This chapter has sketched some of the main features of the translation of news in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. As is so often the case, almost as much attention has been drawn to what we do not know as to what we do. Sitting at the intersection of two burgeoning fields of research on news translation and media history, however, research on historical news translation stands to see significant progress in the coming years as scholars take advantage of digital technologies and statistical methods, and also collaborate in interdisciplinary teams. The internationalisation of research is also promising for this field, especially since the ­early – ­and indeed ­contemporary – ­periodical press was itself by nature international (Raymond and Moxham 2016). As more is revealed about news translation both in the past and today, it is becoming increasingly instructive to think about this specialist form of translation in a transhistorical perspective. At this stage of our understanding, there seem to be more commonalities than differences, especially as we begin to realise that there are often multiple, and at times conflicting, answers to the questions posed by Burke (2007: 11): ‘Who translates? With what intentions? What? For whom? In what manner? With what consequences?’

Case Study 13: Gazette de Londres Nicholas Brownlees The Gazette de Londres (1666–1705) was the third of three French-­language news publications to come out in London in the seventeenth century. The first

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Figure 16.2  Gazette de Londres, 30 June–3 July 1690 (Courtesy of Nicholas Brownlees) two were Le Mercure Anglois (1644–48) and Nouvelles ordinaires de Londres (1650–61). However, unlike Gazette de Londres (henceforth Gazette), the first two publications carried both original material in French as well as translations into French from English-­language newsbooks (Williams 1908: 50; Peacey 2017b: 243). The Gazette was different from its predecessors because it was recognised as a fully fledged translation, the original text being the London Gazette, the newspaper of record. The Gazette had two principal objectives: to make money and, when necessary, to manipulate francophone public opinion towards a positive understanding of British policy. The first aim was interrelated with the language of the periodical. The Gazette was not just targeted at the French equivalent of the English ­readership – ­merchants, gentlemen and all those interested in Court ­affairs – ­but also English readers living in Europe who did not have access to the London Gazette, as well as all foreigners who read and communicated in French (Brownlees 2018: 16). The fact that the French version of the newspaper ran for forty years is testimony to the commercial success it must have had; indeed, it lasted as long as its English counterpart held sway over domestic

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case study 13 : gazette de londres 405 readers. By 1705 the London Gazette was no longer the undisputed newspaper of its day, being ever more challenged by such papers as Post Man and Post Boy which had been founded after the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695. The Gazette had the same political role as Peacey (2017b: 249) ascribed to Nouvelles ordinaires, that is, ‘to promote and defend the English government’. This was most dramatically seen in 1678, at the height of the Popish Plot when the then translator of the newspaper into French, M. Moranville, was summoned before Parliament to explain why a dispatch in the London Gazette had been translated in a particular way. [The Speaker.] There has been a great, and supposed wilful mistake, in the translation of the Gazette into French, viz. ‘that the Papists, refusans de se conformer a la Religion Anglicane’, ‘refusing to conform themselves to the Religion of England,’ &c. ‘are commanded to go out of town,’ without mentioning the present Plot, &c. to be the occasion, as is in the King’s Proclamation recited, &c. You are sent for, to know how this has been foisted in different from the Proclamation. (Grey 1769: 7 November) In the cross-­examination, Moranville admitted his m ­ istake – a ­ n ‘omission by inadvertency’ – but this was not enough to dissuade his accusers from declaring that he had conspired on behalf of the French against the Crown. We do not know how the episode finished other than that ‘M. Moranville was committed to the custody of the Serjeant at Arms, who being also ordered to search him, found upon him several Papers in French, which were referred to a Committee; and that a Committee was also appointed to search his house or lodgings’ (Grey 1769: 7 November).

Chapter Seventeen

WOMEN AND THE EIGHTEENTH-­ CENTURY PRINT TRADE Rebecca Shapiro

Introduction For decades scholars have worked to restore to women writers the important role they played in eighteenth-­century literature, and, as curricula and literary histories demonstrate, those efforts have succeeded. Recently, in the context of increased interest in material conditions of production and functional logistics of the print trade, we realise how much remains to discover about the role of women in this emergent market. Although we still do not know as much as we need to, we do know that women were active in the commercial print trade in many ways: as publishers, printers, booksellers, as patrons for other ­writers – ­often women ­writers – a­ s translators and editors. As many women writers of this period have been retrieved from the oblivion that earlier literary histories consigned them to, scholars are turning their sights to the mass of w ­ omen – f­ rom all social strata, high and l­ ow –w ­ ho made a living from this burgeoning publishing trade, the ‘work of print‘, as Lisa Maruca asserts (2007). Despite a steady stream of recent scholarship including an entire issue of the Huntington Library Quarterly and the Edinburgh University Press volume on women in eighteenth-­ century British publishing, women’s work can be difficult to recuperate. During the early modern period, for example, women often belonged to a vibrant economy outside the home or in shops attached to the home, but a few decades later, so-­called advances in the eighteenth century that gave men more professional opportunities resulted in women having fewer; in the middle and aspiring classes the idea that women should work outside the home and for wages was discouraged. Scholars seeking information about women in the print trade during this period have 406

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women and the eighteenth-­c entury print trade 407 encountered roadblocks because women’s work was often obscured by insufficient public representation. That does not mean that women were inactive; rather, it means that women’s labour was constrained. The rhetorical question Isobel Grundy asks, ‘What difference did women make to the book trade during the long eighteenth century?’, is meaningful, because she asks not whether women were in the print trade, but how (Grundy 2009: 146). Grundy documents women working against criticism of them as authors and as professionals, showing that women were active in all aspects of the book trade. She reminds us that women were not always noted as owners or operators of a family business, as they were not formal members of guilds or property owners. Their accomplishments were obscured perhaps because they engaged in less respectable areas such as hawking broadsheets and ephemeral printed matter; or they were widowed; or they worked using a male pseudonym. Of course, the answer to Grundy’s question is that women made a great difference. This chapter will discuss some of the essential ways that women were active in the printing trades during the eighteenth century, with a focus on ­newspapers – ­as printers, editors and periodical writers.1 During this period several magazines and newspapers addressed themselves to women readers, though it must be asked just what is meant by a periodical for ladies, as they were different demographic groups. As Jennie Batchelor and Manushag N. Powell write, periodicals registered this diversity of their reading public. Thus, the Lady’s Magazine: addressed itself, in its inaugural August 1770 issue, to women from the ‘house-­wife’ to the ‘peeress’, all of whom, the editor hoped, would ‘meet with something suitable to their different walk in life’ in the magazine’s pages. In fact, the periodical’s contents suggest its demographic was still wider, containing as it does letters putatively from, and countless stories about, daughters of cheesemongers and grocers, women in service and women labouring as shopworkers and governesses, even if not all of these women are treated with unqualified sympathy. (Batchelor and Powell 2018: 15) The complete audience in the magazine’s front matter, however, could be considered aspirational. Even so, there is accumulating evidence of 1

I would like to thank the following for their immense help with drafting, sourcing, reading and editing: Kevin Berland, Carolyn Day, Kirstyn Leuner, Lisa Maruca, Kate Ozment, Carole Percy, Orla Smyth, Helen Williams and James Wood.

Figure 17.1  The Lady’s Magazine, August 1770 (Creative Commons Licence, courtesy of Wikimedia)

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women and the eighteenth-­c entury print trade 409 women from various regions and classes active in periodical publishing throughout the eighteenth ­century – ­particularly the later ­period – ­as the professionalisation of writing became more accessible. Much of the content of these newspapers and periodicals is what we today would call prescriptivist. Much scholarship has established as a common theme strict gender conformity embodied in directives for women to become better wives, mothers and home-­makers. Women were to develop their capacities within the private sphere, as theorised by Lawrence Stone (1977) and Jürgen Habermas ([1962] 1989). Towards the end of the century this ‘ideal woman’ predominates in the poetry of Hannah More, the pedagogies of Maria Edgeworth, the polemics of Mary Wollstonecraft and the novels of Jane Austen. What women were taught in the news that they read was no different, though the lines between what was acceptable and what was not have always been contested. There were indeed differences between what women were expected and encouraged to do, and what they actually did, and ­scholars – ­notably Bridget Hill (1989), Nancy Armstrong (1987) and Susan Staves (2006) – have pushed back on this conception of a strict separation of the spheres. Feminist scholars show us how early modern and eighteenth-­century authors advocated for and against women’s domesticity and provided alternate concepts of domesticity; there was not just one public or private sphere, but a shifting sense of propriety that applied to different people and groups.

Writers and Readers, Private and Public Meaning During the eighteenth century the field of writing and reporting was becoming formalised, and terms previously used for private correspondence or managing accounts began to broaden semantically, acquiring public connotations. For example, ‘news’ was not just timely information, but short texts to be shared. ‘Journal’ was shifting from what it had been since the early sixteenth ­century – ­a book in which one related the day’s events or financial a­ ccounts – ­to a periodical comprising various types of information for readers. Nathan Bailey’s Universal Etymological Dictionary (1737) records for the first time ‘journal’ as a work meant to be shared publicly: a journal, he explains, is ‘a common name of several news papers, who detail the particular transactions of Europe’. ‘Journalist’ is first recorded in Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language (1755), although it still primarily referred to private daily accounting, rather than a writer of news to share. The senses were co-­occurring, meaning that the recording of business information was becoming something for others’

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eyes. In Thomas Blount’s Glossographia (1656), ‘news’ was reporting or sharing of scandalous events, and most dictionaries of the period referenced the commodification of news for the public and for sale in courants, gazettes and mercuries. As the senses of ‘journal’ and ‘journalist’ became more public-­facing, and with the advent of women’s newspapers and periodicals, the gendered distinction between who and what was worth writing about and reading was similarly challenged; ephemeral texts were being produced for and about issues said to pertain to women. Women were producing journals meant for the public and being a journalist was moving from private and solitary to public and collective.

The Ladies Mercury and The Ladies Dictionary Some of the first and most important journals and newspapers for women were not actually by women: John Dunton is considered the publisher of the first periodical to address a female readership. An offshoot of his newspaper the Athenian Mercury, the Ladies Mercury only ran for a short period, from February to March 1693, and was printed on both sides of one sheet of paper. The Ladies Mercury is said to have begun when a woman reader asked Dunton to publish more material on women’s interests than the once-­monthly issue of the Athenian Mercury. Like its namesake, the Ladies Mercury answered questions in an advice column, addressing ‘all the most nice and curious questions concerning love, marriage, behaviour, dress, and humour of the female sex, whether virgins, wives, or widows’. It has been speculated that many questions and answers in the Ladies Mercury were written by Dunton, though they were issues that contrasted to those in the Athenian Mercury. According to Nicola Parsons (2018), its content was more liberal than that of the Athenian Mercury. Ostensibly created by a Ladies Society, the first issue of the magazine opens with a promise: we think it our Duty to your fair Sex, to avow, That We shall not only, with all the Zeal and Expedition imaginable, be ready to Answer all Questions You shall vouchsafe to send Us; but we shall likewise make it our Study to avoid even the least offensive Syllable, that may give any rude Shock to the chastest Ear. We declare our selves such Religious Homagers of Vertue and Innocence, that We would not force a Blush into a Virgin-Cheek, having that true Value for Beauty, as to adorn it with no other Vermilion but its own. (28 February 1693)

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women and the eighteenth-­c entury print trade 411 In its letters and advice to women, the magazine’s editorial line was less conservative than one might expect. The Ladies Mercury did not shrink from considering what a woman should do with a wayward husband or how a young lady might hide that she was no longer a virgin. The magazine’s inaugural question concerns beauty and virtue. The letter writer introduces herself as a very young Woman, born of Parents of some little Quality, but not altogether favour’d with an extraordinary Fortune; however, if my Glass and my Friends are not both Flatterers, as far as Beauty can be a valuable Blessing, I stand highly in debted to Providence for a very fair large Portion of that kind, to balance the slenderness of the other. Nevertheless, to come to the unhappy part of my Story; It was my Calamity about two Years since, . . . to be so seduced, as to give up the very Soul of Beauty, my Honour, to a lewd and infamous Rifler, with whom I secretly continued this vile and unhappy Conversation, for near a Twelve Month together. (28 February 1693) Despite a later successful marriage, the writer seeks advice as she is racked with guilt for allowing her husband to believe she had been a virgin upon marriage. The advice she receives is that she should consider herself absolved if she presently behaves justly: You brought Guilt to his Bed, ’tis true, but a truly and nobly repented Guilt. Infamy (the more substantial and sensible wrong) you brought none, for your sin lyes concealed from the world. Your Husband, for his part, tasted no fainter nor weaker sweets in your Embraces for having a Rose-­bud crop’d before him: For Ignorance keeps up the Devotion. (28 February 1693) This exchange acknowledges beauty and virtue as separable, and it advises the letter writer that her beauty is undiminished if only she knows her secret. The reality is that though she might stray before marriage, she is safe as long as she is true afterwards. Deceiving one’s husband is justified if it ensures marital peace. The Ladies Dictionary (1694), published a year after the Ladies Mercury, was not a periodical, although much content had been lifted from the Athenian Mercury’s women’s issues. The Ladies Dictionary was full of household advice and information to make women more attractive and is unambiguously prescriptive. Women must be devoted to domestic, not intellectual, issues in entries such as ‘Beauty’, ‘Beauty in General’, ‘Beauty in Charm’, ‘Beauty in Women’. Cosmetics are admissible: ‘Beautifying for honest purposes (then); not being proved a

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Figure 17.2  The Ladies Dictionary, 1694 (LSE Library, no restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons)

sin, we see no reason to forbid it, when God and Nature has allowed it’ (N.H. [Dunton] 1694: 57). While Dunton dilates upon ‘beauty’ under the entry for books he also admonishes, ‘It is not necessary then to read many Books, but to read the best, and especially never to be curious of such, whereby we cannot Learn any thing without the danger of becoming Vitious’, singling out novels and political pamphlets for criticism (1694: 68). In sum, women are meant to be attractive and not intellectual, with twenty pages devoted to beauty while the entry on books is less than two. The emergence of prescriptive conduct literature increased during the eighteenth century, as a fast and affordable way to reach women was through newspapers and periodicals. Dunton in particular was canny in repurposing information, and his works were part of an emerging social vernacular for middle- and upper-­class readers. The Ladies Mercury and The Ladies Dictionary, through their authoritative stances, aimed to regulate women’s public and private behaviour, albeit in different ways.

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The Lady’s Magazine Other women’s periodicals of the period include the Female Spectator (1744–76) (Plate 10), the Female Tatler (1709–10) and the Old Maid (1775–76), while many others were part of an evolving and diverse genre of writing for women. Periodicals printed poems, letters, moral tales, political writing, ballads, recipes and advertisements for books and other newspapers. As women’s roles changed, so did the kinds of things women wrote and read; magazines and newspapers found audiences engaged in lively exchanges. Each issue of the Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832) ran between forty and fifty pages, giving readers diverse material including poems, letters to the editor, translations, drawings, fashion advice and engravings, needlework patterns, recipes and puzzles. As magazine readerships grew, they participated more actively in the project itself, and, as scholars have noted, these kinds of magazines can be seen to have forged a sense of community among female readers (see, for example, Shevelow 1989; Batchelor 2011; Fergus 2006; as well as several valuable chapters in Batchelor and Powell 2018 by Catherine Ingrassia, Evan Hayes Gledhill, Kathryn R. King and Barbara M. Benedict). The private was becoming public by virtue of writing about it. Indeed, one of the paradoxes of the increasing cultural weight of what Nancy Armstrong (1987) refers to as ‘domestic ideology’ is that confining women to the home and militating against women’s involvement in trade and commerce ensured that women represented an increasingly important sector of the print market. Women’s investment in the print market as readers also generated, almost mechanically, additional investment in this area of trade as printers and editors. As Kathryn Shevelow observes: During the eighteenth century, as upper- and middle-­ class Englishwomen increasingly began to participate in the public realm of print culture, the representational practices of that culture were steadily enclosing them within the private sphere of the home. That is, at the same historical moment that women ­were . . . ­becoming visible as readers and writers, the literary representation of ­women – ­whether as members of an intended audience, as writing subjects, or as textural ­objects – ­was producing an increasingly narrow and restrictive model of femininity. (Shevelow 1989: 1) If the question-­and-­answer format of the Ladies Mercury posits an unknowing reader and a knowing editor who guides, the format of the

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Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832), now published by subscription, was very different. It, too, addressed the ‘Fair Sex’, but Jennie Batchelor (2008) reminds us that ‘This is not to say that the magazine was merely a conduct book by another name’: it provided a vehicle for readers to participate in creating and affirming the ideology of what a woman of a more genteel class would be. Women read the magazine, but they also wrote for it, and in its pages the ideology that women were not meant to be intellectuals is frequently contested. Nonetheless, as Batchelor (2008) asserts, ‘moral propriety was essential, with literary elegance running a near second on the list of publication priorities’. A keyword search of the index to the Lady’s Magazine in the Adam Matthew database shows that ‘conduct’ appears 147 times, revealing how much weight was attached to defining how a woman should behave. One might argue that because it integrated into its pages so many voices, the woman invariably found herself identified in diverse and inconsistent ways, and yet we also see signs of a hardening of gender roles, stringent in the requirements of female virtue. Consider a letter published in the Lady’s Magazine along with an embedded poem. Ostensibly similar to letters found in the Ladies Mercury, the context and the form has nonetheless changed. Here, a man writes of his landlady’s maid who has killed herself after discovering that her lover betrayed her by marrying a chaste woman. The letter writer explains, I could not help reflecting on the misfortune of so many of the female sex, who are deluded by the stale and worn-­out promise of a speedy ­marriage . . . ­not one out of twenty, who have yielded to satisfy the ardent desires of their l­ overs . . . ­is ever united to the man, to whom she yields her virgin treasure; or if she is so happy as to gain the name of wife, jars, jealousies, and endless confusion, usurp dominion over peace, harmony, and conjugal affection. O chastity! thou best companion to the female world! arrayed with that beautiful and alluring garment, they defy the tongue of slander, and the blast of malice; but if once they swerve from the rules of rigid virtue, contempt, ignominy, and shame, with their baleful influence, burst like a torrent o’er their devoted heads, and death and ruin close the horrid scene. (November 1770, 174) The letter writer encloses a letter written by a fallen woman, formerly of high station, echoing that of the maid. These embedded letters reinforce the point that women of all social strata should consider chastity as their most valuable possession. The earlier, tolerant view towards a young woman who had sex before marriage is replaced with one that

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women and the eighteenth-­c entury print trade 415 reifies her virginity. The magazine voices harsh judgements on women who fail to comply with gender norms. The ironies are patent: even as women in much greater numbers acquired a voice in ­print – ­and thus participated in the public sphere of critical opinion and ­debate – ­the identities they could forge as a community of women writing for women did not invariably entail questioning gender norms. On the contrary, women ­writers – i­n this sense of women who published in ­magazines – ­could codify their identity in conformist ways. Such moral tales were typical of the Lady’s Magazine. That a man was the putative author of this tale of two women might suggest that women were not the only participants. The editors claimed that the content of the magazine was ‘supplied entirely by Female Pens’ (January 1781, iii), though it remains unclear exactly who was responsible for its content. Batchelor points out that more subscriptions to the newspaper bore the name of men than of women (although men are likely to have paid for subscriptions), and there were male editors and authors with ambiguous names or initials. Most importantly perhaps, the format of the paper, which pitched itself as the vehicle of contributions from a variety of readers, ensured that it could never present one monolithic vision of women’s capacities. If many contributions promoted a rigid vision of women’s conduct, the variety of content presumed a high degree of women’s literacy, as well as that women would voice opinion and participate in debate.

The Lady’s Monthly Museum Among major women’s periodicals of the period was the Lady’s Monthly Museum (1798–1828). Smaller than the Lady’s Magazine, in an octavo format, it claimed to be more focused on scientific matters. Nonetheless, it usually featured much the same kinds of moral tales, poems and letters to the editor as the Lady’s Magazine. As with the Lady’s Magazine it cultivated robust contact with its readership; authors and readers corresponded in its pages, providing additional printed matter, and eliding the distinction between creator and consumer. The many women who were involved in the writing and production of this and many other periodicals challenged the notion that women were uninterested in serious writing. And yet, despite editors providing a platform for elevated discussions and contributions, the newspaper abounded in romances and ‘agony aunt’ columns. Indeed, after several years of sentimentality and contributions more inclined to ‘amuse the fancy than enlarge the mind’, in 1811 the editors of the Lady’s Monthly Museum determined to return to improving their

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readers’ intellects. They write carefully in the introduction to the new issue that it is the intention of the Editor to restore the Monthly Museum to its original c­ onstruction – t­o make it a receptacle for useful and miscellaneous information; and by giving ready admission to familiar Essays, Historical Anecdotes, Literary Notices, and Observations on the Fine Arts, to embody in the compass of a few sheets of letter-­press as much variety as the nature of our Repertory will ­admit . . . ­though we must necessarily confine our Novel and Romance writers within narrower bounds; we beg leave to signify, that in a work devoted principally to the Fair Sex, we are too sensible of the importance of such effusions, and of the talents and ingenuity of their authors, not to give them every latitude in our power. (vol. 11, 1811, n.p.) From this issue forward, the editors claimed to pursue a more professionalised direction so that women would have serious reading matter, paralleling periodicals addressed to a male readership. Interspersed with articles, tales, poems and other matter appeared discussion of General James Wolfe, Addison, Bacon and Shakespeare. Over time, the concept of a journal and a journalist transformed. The Ladies Monthly Museum was timely when in 1798 it introduced a column entitled ‘The Journalist’, which parodied the fiction that women were supposed to enjoy. This is yet another example of the interwoven private and public spheres and is a good example of how shifts in language reflected or included shifts in possibilities for women’s roles. ‘The Journalist’ has fun with women’s writing as both serious and silly. In so doing it opens up women’s writing in a variety of both public and private genres and contexts, marking gossip and treatises as equally valuable.

Ladies Own Memorandum-Book In contrast to other periodicals and newspapers for women, Anne ­Fisher – ­and later her daughter Sarah H ­ odgson – ­asserted in the Ladies Own Memorandum-Book (1769–1805) that women were to keep important financial information at the ready in the form of a daily journal. What makes Fisher’s periodical unusual is its hybridity, as it presents prose and essays, but is more concerned with daily business that women would find germane to their working lives. Thus, in addition to poetry and light fiction, there were hackney coach fares, tables for market, interest rates and important holidays. The series provided

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women and the eighteenth-­c entury print trade 417 ample space for users to create their own accounts and write in the journal. It was especially known for its stimulating puzzles and ‘enigmas’, popular with women and men. One significant difference of the Ladies Own Memorandum-Book is that other memorandum books and journals, as Stephen Colclough observes, were generally written for a male audience, with ‘tables of lists and tables of information “proper for every man of business to know”’ (Colclough 2015: 159). Because Fisher was an author, printer and publisher in her own right, working with her husband Thomas Slack, it is likely that she knew other women in the printing business and realised that the economy was driven by women’s decisions as well as men’s. The 1769 volume begins with ‘The Mirror, an original poetic Song’ followed by ‘The Bear and Gardener, an original Fable’, a form for entering accounts, a plan of lunar and solar events, and lists of religious and national events. The journal brought together financial documents and practical instructions for painting or drawing. The majority of the volumes included an ‘old-­fashioned’ journal and, interspersed with appointments, business and household information, numerous songs and poems by women and men. The final section was a series of ‘enigmas’. For example, ‘Enigma XVII’ by William Smith, pithily declares, ‘What a whimsical thing perhaps is a-­coming, / By telling the truth when its brains out are running. / Two heads it has got with a mouth either way; / ’Tis an emblem to ­show – ­how we should live and to pray’ (Ladies Own, 1769, n.p.). The editors follow this up with the time-­honoured marketing strategy of informing readers that those who submit the best solution would ‘have a chance at’ winning previous volumes of the journal. With this promotional ploy they created interaction and shifted copies otherwise left unsold.

Conclusion Amanda Vickery wrote in an introductory essay to the Adam Matthew microform collection of women’s periodicals: The eighteenth century represents something of a black hole in the social history of women, a vaguely defined nowhere land between the well-­documented nineteenth century and the more exciting seventeenth. To be sure, caricatures of the eighteenth century have served as preludes to accounts of Victorian gender or postscripts to studies of seventeenth-­century patriarchy, but sustained research on the years 1700 to 1780 has been comparatively rare.

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Thankfully, that black hole has got smaller since the first two decades of the twenty-­first century, which saw much work done in reconstructing the print trade surrounding women’s periodicals. Numerous books and articles have increasingly challenged the concept of ‘separate spheres’ for women and men during the eighteenth century, and provide evidence of women who often remained in the sphere of ­business – ­or entered it in a different way. Scholars are revising concepts of ownership, work, property and business dealings of women as well as the men who worked with and for them. The fields of newspaper and print studies, or the broader understanding of the work of print, now acknowledges that women’s work was much more complex and contradictory than previously understood. As more information is discovered about what women did in publishing, the understanding of women’s work shows that the boundaries were not so strict as have been thought. It is useful to consider the shift in the kinds of knowledge and activities that were deemed important for women, from a focus on appearances and romances of the Ladies Mercury, to the moral tales and intellectualism of the Lady’s Magazine to the more rational yet light-­hearted Lady’s Monthly Museum, to the business-­ oriented practicality of Ladies Own Memorandum-Book. The varied networks of the printing trade reveal how women were essential to the work, and the emerging scholarship enables us to see just how much additional information there is yet to discover about women and print, and the social norms that enabled them to participate in it in multifarious ways.

Case Study 14: Anne Fisher and the Print Trade Rebecca Shapiro Much of what we know about the eighteenth-­century book trade and the role of women in it has largely been focused on women as authors or patrons of ­authors – a ­ nd often those women were privileged. This is because some women writers could control their work and its publication, or they had important friends who assisted them in presenting work to publishers or sharing their library. A reason for less critical attention before now is the difference in literacy rates between women and men, as well as between classes of women. On the production side of the book trade, what is largely known about women has been the result of their inheritance of businesses as widows or, less obviously, as wives of printers or booksellers. But that is not entirely all, for many women engaged in family businesses that functioned in their homes, and therefore their proximity to trade was more interwoven than earlier assumed.

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case study 14 : anne fisher and the print trade 419 While women were not necessarily owners of print shops or bookshops, they did work in them and participate in running them. Women as printers and publishers in London have been studied for some time, and recent work has moved to understanding the provincial printing trades. Newcastle was a prolific centre of the provincial print trade, significant for being well positioned between London, Oxford and Edinburgh, and it is where recent attention has focused on women and the press. One woman who managed to both write and publish her own books, pamphlets and newspapers was Anne Fisher (1719–78), who worked with her husband Thomas Slack (1723–84), owner of Slack and Company. Fisher was already an author of numerous grammars and a dictionary when they began to print and publish not only her works but those of others. Through family documents, it is also clear that Fisher was not just knowledgeable about the trade by marriage, but was professional enough to create a network of patrons and friends and mentor other authors. While there are not many extant details regarding Fisher’s activity in Slack and Company’s ventures, two sources provide evidence that she was an important part of the family business: her correspondence with poet John Cunningham and a family history by the Hodgsons, her daughter’s married name. Anne Fisher has come to be known not just as one of the first women to compile a dictionary but also as an authority for some grammatical features and rules in English by which we still abide (Isaac 2004a). She has been largely credited with establishing in A New Grammar (1745) the ‘universal he’ pronoun rule, which states that both women and m ­ en – o ­ r ‘she and he’ – can efficiently be covered by just ‘he’. The eighteenth century was a particularly auspicious time for instituting arbitrary grammatical rules and moves to ‘fix’ the language, as the print trade was burgeoning. Fisher later codified her pedagogical approach to writing by adding examples of ‘bad’ grammar and sample exercises to her work, making A Practical new grammar, with exercises of bad English (1789) extremely popular. Because language and its systems were becoming a profession, arbitrating on words and how they should be used was ­powerful – ­and whoever promoted the ‘right’ rules likewise had the potential to be p ­ owerful – a ­ s Fisher was. It is difficult to quantify how integral Fisher was in the businesses her husband Thomas Slack owned, but they worked together in several ventures, including their press, a book and stationery shop, and a newspaper. When Slack started his company in 1763, Fisher moved the copyright to her work Pleasing Instructor (1756) to it: her works on grammar and pedagogy were a financial asset for a printing press. As Helen Williams notes, Fisher ‘personally signed [her book] to protect her copyright’, and her ‘anthology of moral literature for children, was hugely popular [going] through numerous editions throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’ (2022: 107).

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The Slacks seem to have enjoyed a mutually satisfying work relationship, as they not only wrote on similar topics but published together. Slack and Company’s printing enterprise was responsible for over one hundred titles or editions, including many by Fisher. Among these were her Ladies Own Memorandum-Book (first published in 1769) – a collection of puzzles, short pieces on women’s work, poems and economic tools. Immensely popular, the periodical became less focused on women as readers as more men signalled interest. Other works by Fisher include A Practical New Grammar (1762), A New English Exercise Book (1770), An Accurate New Spelling Dictionary (3rd edn, 1777) and The New English Tutor (1778). Under the pseudonym ‘S. Thomas’, Slack published books of a pedagogic nature, complementing those of his wife. His contributions were more business-­oriented: The British Negociator (1759), The Banker’s Sure Guide (1762), Britannicus estimator (1764) which became The Ready Calculator (1771), and The Commercial Palladium (1775). Several of Fisher’s books had dual publishers, ’printed for C. Hitch and L. Hawes, and J. Richardson, in Pater Noster-­Row; and Thomas Slack, in Newcastle’, or ‘printed at London for J. Richardson, L. Hawes, and T.  Slack’. This business would have brought them additional income and greater reach. In addition to publishing books, Slack and Company established the Newcastle Chronicle in 1764. Fisher and Slack worked as colleagues, rather than as operator and assistant, and their partnership seems to have been well known. The Monthly Chronicle in 1890 records that Mr. Slack was a man of much force of character, combining excellent business capacity with no mean scholastic attainments. His wife, too, had literary aptitudes and tastes. The couple were not merely printers and booksellers, but they were bookmakers and journalists as well. (Welford 1907: 37) Peter Isaac, in his ODNB entry on Thomas Slack (2004b), mentions that he was ‘ably assisted by his wife’, but there is ample evidence that their partnership was more egalitarian, and that Fisher was actively involved in running the press. Helen Williams draws attention to a letter Fisher sent to the poet John Cunningham in 1771 (on publishing a second edition of Cunningham’s Poems, Chiefly Pastoral): Mr Slack is at London & has been for some Time on which Account I have been too much hurried with Business to be so punctual in my Correspondences as I cou’d have wished, we shall dry your Title Sheets directly, & to be ready to send a few of Books to you in a weeks Time if you choose It, & advise how we are to send them &c? (Williams 2022: 98)

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case study 14 : anne fisher and the print trade 421 In the Hodgson family collected papers, Fisher writes, ‘I have two binding in the most elegant taste for Mrs Montague which I shall take an opportunity to send by some passengers going in the fly’. Williams makes an important point regarding Fisher’s use of ‘we’ or ‘I’: ‘This is a rare insight into the daily life of a female printer in her own words and should be recognised as much more than simply “understanding”, and “management in absence”’ (2022: 98). Fisher conveyed practical matters to her correspondents. The Slacks ably worked with other publishers to streamline business, and after Fisher’s death the connections they had made proved useful when Slack’s daughter Sarah took over. The Newcastle Chronicle did so well as to excite interest from other newspaper publishers. According to Victoria E. M. Gardner, ‘William Blanchard of the York Chronicle, seemingly following interest from Thomas Slack at the Newcastle Chronicle, proposed establishing an express along the North Road from his office in York to Slack at the Chronicle, possibly including Thomas Saint of the Newcastle Courant’ (2016: 153). Fisher and Slack additionally seem to have been the hub of intellectual and literary sociability in Newcastle. Perhaps the most famous of their acquaintances was Elizabeth Montague, who routinely visited when she was staying in the area. Many years later, the Slacks’ salon remained memorable: Their shop was a club as well as a shop, where by the law of affinities, the literatures, artists, actors and politicians of the district congregated. Tradition assures us that their colloquies on topics of current interest exerted an elevating influence on local aspirations and habits. (Welford 1907: 37) Other notable figures in Newcastle were Robert Carr, the engraver Thomas Bewick, and Gilbert Gray. Fisher’s role in this group of intellectuals and artists was recorded in the Newcastle Chronicle after her death in 1778, with more than one tribute to her as a superior businesswoman and arbiter of good grammar. Fisher’s business sense and her social connections are apparent in her correspondence with the poet and player John Cunningham, whose work the Slacks published. Fisher wrote to him offering advice and discussing publishing with the confidence of someone intimately involved in daily activities. On one occasion she suggested to Cunningham that he dedicate a volume to Elizabeth Montague: ‘We all thought it best to continue ye old dedication on all accounts, as you continued to dedicate to ye same person. I have not heard from Mrs Montague since you left Shields’ (Hodgson 1921: 93). Cunningham, however, chose David Garrick (who promptly disparaged Cunningham, highlighting Fisher’s acumen). ­Despite – ­or perhaps because ­of – ­Cunningham’s need for assistance, what began as a business and literary relationship became one of friendship and mentoring, aptly summed up in the following message from Fisher to Cunningham:

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We are glad you are coming to this neighbourhood when I hope we shall be able, & you’ll be ready, to go on with another edition of your poems. We have writ to London to urge it & purpose to take half those they have upon hand if required, to have them at once into a better selling size. When we hear from them will let you know, Mr. Slack, Bob & my young folks all join in compliments to Mr. Cunningham. (Hodgson 1921: 90) From their inception, the Slack printing businesses were reliant on women in the family, and it became an intergenerational enterprise when Thomas Slack left the newspaper to their daughter Sarah, who married Slack’s presumed apprentice Solomon Hodgson. Together the Hodgsons ran the Newcastle Chronicle until Solomon’s death, whereupon Sarah ran it again by herself, even buying back a portion of the ownership that Solomon had given up. The Hodgsons, with other provincial editors, worked together to collect subscriptions for each other’s newspapers and shared news items, thus cutting costs by reproducing information among the various print editions. The Newcastle Chronicle expanded to become a printing company for other presses and provided advertisements for publications such as the Newcastle Advertiser and the Newcastle Courant. Sarah Hodgson became a supplier to the northern publisher John Ware, and one of the most popular books she supplied Ware was her mother’s book, Fisher’s Grammar (Isaac 2001). According to Peter Isaac, Sarah was more competent than her mother and continued the business successfully into the nineteenth century, which suggests that Fisher and Slack’s good example and excellent guidance for women and the publishing field was well followed. Despite the weight of cultural norms which over the eighteenth century consigned women to the private sphere of the home, the print w ­ orld – ­in all of its ­facets – r­epresented an area of commercial and cultural activity that opened several avenues for women. In this chapter, I have surveyed just a sampling of the period’s magazines to show how market ­forces – ­women as a public of ­readers – ­generated new means of communication for women and, perhaps most significantly, among women as women. I have also focused on the activities of printer-­publisher spouses to show how the moral writing of the period provided a much more clear-­cut image of women’s place in the social world than the lived experience of the print field ever validated. Anne Fisher worked alongside her husband in a successful printing venture. No one should downplay the effects of gender norms on women’s lives during this period, but we do know that the print world, which did so much to disseminate and reinforce those norms, hosted within itself an array of opportunities for women who participated in that realm of public business and exchange to contest, if not always in word, then at least in deed, its strictures.

Chapter Eighteen

THE MEDICAL PRESS Irma Taavitsainen

Introduction The period in focus is characterised by swifter dissemination of medical and scientific knowledge in new publication channels. The continuum to the present day with its highly digitised scientific news delivery with almost real-­time publication pace has its roots in these developments. The chronological line is clear from the earliest phases, with a progression from more general journals to more specialised media of communication including more specialised professional journals for learned medical doctors. By their side there were information channels targeted at lay people seeking medical knowledge, such as the polite society general magazine. Instead of the traditional chronology with the turns of the centuries as dividing lines, I shall take the years when important new channels were established as signposts, because at least in the field of the medical press ‘[n]othing of significance ends at the end of a century; nothing of significance begins at its beginning’ (Gross et al. 2002: 90). The geographical spread of the medical press in the British Isles was fairly limited in the period in focus, with London as the hub of medical printing in the seventeenth century. Scotland gained in importance and took the lead in the eighteenth century; Dublin is specified as a distribution area, and some smaller towns such as Birmingham and Bristol are occasionally mentioned. Medicine is both a science and an art, with a theoretical side and practical applications. This twofold nature shows in medical communications in the press, as they include both theoretical articles about the basis of the discipline and instructive texts discussing how the innovations should be implemented in practice. The intended audiences played a major role, as recipients varied from highly learned 423

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medical doctors to other literate people involved in healing practices as well as lay people (Jenner and Wallis 2007). Audience adaptation shows in the styles of writing, as authors adapted their language use to their intended audiences and their background knowledge, whether professionals, educated readers interested in learning about medicine, or lay audiences (Bell 1984; 2001; Jucker 1992). Medical writers also came from different educational backgrounds and varied from highly learned professionals and experts in narrow fields to amateurs. The genres of medical writing in the early periodicals range from medical news to new science experimental reports, and from handbooks and other instructive texts to case studies and book reviews. Special attention will be paid to genre developments. The mode of writing varies from monologic language use to interactive negotiation with readers and epistolary texts from foreign and domestic correspondents. Some medical knowledge belonged to the education of every civilised member of society in this period, especially in the polite society of the eighteenth century, but its scope and depth varied. The most important channels for the dissemination of this knowledge in general were newspapers, books and booklets. Periodicals increased in importance especially after the establishment of the new Royal Society publication in 1665. Intended for the small elite of its highly educated members, its influence was significant. Other institutional periodicals followed in the eighteenth century, and the first general magazine for polite society was founded in 1731. The different types of publications overlap in the second half of the seventeenth century as materials circulated widely in extracts and reprints.

Medical Materials in Newspapers, 1640–65 The year 1640 is mentioned as the earliest date in the title of the typed manuscript ‘British Periodicals of Medicine: A Chronological List 1640–1899’ by W. R. Lefanu (1938). It provides a chronological catalogue of periodical publications recording new channels of medical communication and important advances with the purpose of giving ‘a much truer and fuller picture of the progress of m ­ edicine . . . ­than would a list of contemporaneous book titles’ (Lefanu 1938: 1). No publication is given from the year 1640, but hospital records are mentioned as their forerunners; for example, five hospitals in the City of London 1645–56 offer some original contributions. Early newsbooks and other forms of news periodicals were the first to record some occasional medical items such as announcements and advertisements in the seventeenth century. For example, the

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the medical press 425 advertising periodical the Publick Adviser included two announcements offering medical services in its issue from 26 May 1657. The first is entitled ‘Physitians’ and the second ‘Nurses wet and dry’. The texts inform potential customers where they can consult two medical doctors with different backgrounds or employ nurses or childcare personnel for their households. The location where the services were available is given first, followed by a long list of diseases and ailments that the physicians would cure, if ‘curable’; this reservation is enforced by a reference to God’s will, which provides an honourable way out in case of failure. There is a Physician resident at the Surgeons Arms in New-­Street, between Aldersgate street and Redcrosse street, who by the blessing of God and his own endeavours cures all Distempers whatsoever, if curable, as the French Disease, Running of the Reins, Meagrim, Convulsions, Palsie . . . (p. 7) A Doctor of Physick lately come from beyond Sea whose education, private study, and foreign travel, hath given him advantages above others, cures by God’s assistance all manner of Diseases curable . . . (p. 8) The last item under the same title advertises a coffee shop where customers can purchase a ‘very wholsome and Physical drink’. According to this information, coffee ‘fortifies the heart within, helpeth Digestion, quickneth the Spirit’ and is a panacea against a long list of diseases, thus relevant for a heading referring to medical services. The second advertisement (Publick Adviser, 26 May 1657, 10) gives information about hiring the services of ‘Nurses wet and dry’. It begins with an address of where to go ‘If any Gentleman’ or more generally ‘Any person that is wanting of a nurse to attend their Children, or any sick person’ (see Whitt, this volume).

The Philosophical Transactions and Two Short-­lived Early Periodicals The first scientific periodical, the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, was launched in 1665, three years after the Royal Society was founded in 1662. The model for a new type of institution came from abroad: three years earlier the Medici court at Florence had formed the Accademia del Cimento which organised empirical experiments and published reports on them in Saggi di Nauturali Experienze fatte nell’Accademia del Cimento. In France, the

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Academié royale des Sciences was granted official status by King Louis XIV in 1666 with a similar programme (Turner 2003: 512). With Philosophical Transactions, the Royal Society created a novel channel that marked a new era with new practices. The pace of delivering information about recent achievements in natural sciences, including medicine, became much faster. Regular connections by post were established in the seventeenth century, roads improved and it became easier to keep contact across the Channel; in the years that followed international networks of scientists kept up a lively epistolary contact (Atkinson 1999). Letters disseminated medical and scientific news from abroad and formed a significant part in the repertoire of the Philosophical Transactions, and medical topics featured prominently in its contents. Most importantly, however, the new periodical provided a forum for the emerging thought style of empiricism. Scientific experiments formed the basis of the new Society’s major activities (Shapin 1996). The genre of experimental essay was created for Philosophical Transactions to encapsulate the new matter-­of-­fact thought style of observation: everyone could agree on what happened in nature, even if they might disagree on the causal explanations of these appearances (Dear 1991: 161). Observation and experiments were the keys to the new science. Experiments were performed in front of a live audience that consisted of Royal Society members and were not limited to the particular field of the experiment (Gotti 2001; Moessner 2006). Thus, for example, the transfusion of blood or dissections of animal bodies were witnessed by architects as well as chemists and physicians, and all took part in the ensuing discussions as peers. Compared to the old mode of disseminating scientific knowledge, Philosophical Transactions was fast and efficient. Whereas it had taken years before Harvey’s groundbreaking discovery of the circulation of blood reached its British audience, since the theory was presented in a monograph De motu cordis and published in Latin in Frankfurt in 1628, it took only a few weeks to issue blood transfusion reports, mostly on dogs and sheep, in Philosophical Transactions. The style of writing was radically different from the old mode, as exemplified by the following extract reporting on anatomical observations made with a microscope. The new instrument opened up the micro world to the human eye for the first time. The empirical report was written in the first person in a tentative mode. The process is described in detail: I fixt upon; I found, notwithstanding all my care to preserve the Vessel, when I was freeing them, as heedfully as I could, from the

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Figure 18.1  Edmund King, ‘Transfusing blood, an account’ (1667), a handwritten draft for Philosophical Transactions (Courtesy of Wellcome Collection, Creative Commons Attribution 4.0)

supposed Parenchyma, that in every breah, I made, either with my fingers or otherwise, all my endeavours were destructive to my purpose . . . (EMEMT, King, Philosophical Transactions, 1666, 316). The new style was very much in contrast to the medieval science of scholasticism which focused on logocentric research with the aim of establishing the original meanings of ancient scientific texts (Taavitsainen 2004: 50–62). Experimental reports, however, do not constitute even a fifth of the contents of Philosophical Transactions volumes (Bazerman 1988: 65), and there is a great deal of variation in this genre (Atkinson 1999: 84). Other contents include anatomical studies on animals and reports on dissections, accounts of natural phenomena and descriptions of geographical locations as well as other matters. The long publishing tradition of monographs continued all through the period and remained

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the most important means of distributing knowledge of medical and scientific matters in the eighteenth century. The early volumes of Philosophical Transactions were largely created by the German-­ born Henry Oldenburgh (1618/19–77) who emigrated from Holland to London and became the Royal Society secretary and the journal’s first editor. He was behind a great part of the early Philosophical Transactions contents (Valle 1999). According to numerical estimates, his contribution in writing the ‘accounts’ was significant: translations of international news and correspondence, and even anonymous book reviews have been attributed to him (Moessner 2007: 206–7). As a polyglot who had mastered several vernacular languages, Oldenburgh could easily mediate news from the Continent to British readers, and the frequency of items published in Latin, the lingua franca of science at the time, is also remarkable. In addition to editorial contributions, Philosophical Transactions published texts by various authors, including amateurs. This characteristic of English empiricism persisted well into the eighteenth century, and is reflected in the varied nature of composition, as well as in the predominance of the epistolary format (Gross et al. 2002: 91). Philosophical Transactions was a general scientific periodical with medical topics prominently present in the contents, especially in the first decades after its founding. This reflects the fact that the membership at the time included a large number of medical practitioners (Hall 1971). With the growth of specialised medical societies in the eighteenth century, medical contributions declined in importance (McClellan 1985: 37–8), but nevertheless they continued in Philosophical Transactions throughout the eighteenth century. The boundaries of various branches of science were not drawn in the same way as a century later. For example, medical astrology or alchemy were not yet discarded from the canon, for both were important branches of science with medical applications in defining appropriate times for medication and in Paracelsian medicine. They were part of the dominant culture, which peaked in England around 1650, but sympathies cooled among the educated classes after the Restoration, with the triumph of the new science also contributing to its rejection (Porter 2000: 151). One of the characteristic features of the time was, however, the interest in all kinds of curiosities of nature, evidenced in reports of rare mutations and strange objects in Philosophical Transactions. Philosophical Transactions was well received from the beginning. It became the most important vehicle for communicating new science at the end of the seventeenth century, based on the Baconian research

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the medical press 429 agenda, emphasising the importance of authentic data without preconceived ideas. The facts could then be analysed to arrive at a theory based on inductive reasoning (Valle 1999: 97–9; see also Hiltunen 2010). Articles on medicine often focused on the particularities of individual cases (patients, illnesses, medicines). Medical topics had been prominent at first, reflecting the early Royal Society membership, but became rarer with the generally increasing disciplinary specialisation (Porter 1989). In addition to Philosophical Transactions, there were some periodical publications that came out for only a few issues and ran but for a short time. The first of them was called Weekly Memorials: for the Ingenious or, an Account of books Lately set forth in Several Languages. With Other Accounts relating to Arts and Sciences (1682). The long subtitle reveals the target audience and the purpose. It was intended to be a miscellany with medical matters included, and much of the contents overlap with Philosophical Transactions. The new publication was dedicated to Robert Boyle, who was praised according to the conventions of the time in flourishing terms such as ‘A Most Worthy Promoter of All Truly Ingenious Knowledge’. One of the sources was the French Journal des sçavans which had been established the year before in 1681. The following book account serves as an example of the close connection between the two. The article is called ‘An Extract of a Letter writ to the Author of the J­ournal . . . ­ Concerning the Observations which M. Du Vernay has made on the Organ of Hearing’. The passage below gives evidence of the close-­knit discourse community of the ‘Curious’ to whom this publication was addressed, together with Philosophical Transactions: Mr. Du Vernay has applied himself of late to consider the Ear, with all the skill and exactness that may be. He has made two publick Demonstrations of the parts that compose it, and is preparing to give shortly the Description of it illustrated with a great many Figures done with great exactness. The Curious will not be displeased to have in the Journal a rough Draught as it were of what he intends to give in this Work; and, indeed, he gathers together too great a number of excellent things to be all touch’d upon in particular . . . (Weekly Memorials, pp. 63–4) The second periodical mentioned by Lefanu (1938: 5) was Medicina curiosa; or a variety of new communications in physick, chirurgery, and anatomy from 1684. It was more strictly focused on medical matters, but only two issues of this London periodical were published. Lefanu’s next entry for the seventeenth century is from 1686,

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Figure 18.2  Engraving of the quack Dr Bossy with assistants, selling medicines in London (Courtesy of Wellcome Collection. Public Domain Mark, 1.0 Credit)

Hippocrates ridens, or joco-serious reflections on the Impudence and mischiefs of quacks and illiterate pretenders to physick. This publication was licensed to Rob Midgley (1653–1723, MD), a literary figure and an influential satirist in London’s literary circles. The title reveals his ironical or even satirical stance towards illegal practitioners, which was common in pamphlets. The text is written as a dialogue between Hippocrates and Democritus, with interactive linguistic features and emotional outbursts. The opening text of the periodical paints the scene in broad strokes: [N]othing is more valuable than the Health and Lives . . . so the latter, as well as the former, have been and are obnoxious to the Attacks of the shameless Crue of wretched Ignoramuses. We have every day Swarms of pretended Physicians that never wore Gown, unalphabetical AEsculapiuses, that commenc’d Doctors in

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the medical press 431 a Stall of the Hemp-shop; Masters of no Arts, but those of Fraud and Impudence; imposing on the credulity of the Vulgar . . . (Hippocrates Ridens, 1686, 1, emphasis original)

Early Specialised London Periodicals and Catering for Polite Society The way to the next phase of development was paved by a short-­lived London journal from 1716 called The British Physician, treating of our diet and common nourishment, of air, of medicines, of physical and Chyrurgial writers, etc. published by J. Morphew (Lefanu 1938). It continued the tradition of health guides that flourished in the earlier periods (Suhr 2010), and was more specialised than the periodicals of the previous century. It lasted five issues, of which issues 3–5 came out with an altered name, Great Britain’s Rule of Health. Institutionalisation was the most important factor that contributed to the establishment of the more specialised medical press in Britain. Philosophical Transactions was created under the auspices of the Royal Society in 1665, and new societies followed the example by initiating their own journals in the fields of their specialisations. On the Continent, several newly established medical societies had already begun to publish specialised medical journals and initiated a pan-­ European phenomenon; their overall number grew from seven to 118 (Kronick 1976). Britain followed this new trend. Lefanu’s list gives a good idea of the extent of this practice; for example, several London societies had their own publications. Old institutions such as the College of Physicians in London (founded in 1518) and the Royal Society of Physicians (from the same year) published Medical Transactions (1768–1820) and the London Medical Journal (1780–90), respectively. The Society for Promoting Medical Knowledge published Medical Communications (from 1784 to 1790) and the Medical Society of London issued Memoirs (1787–1805). A Society for the Improvement of Medical and Chirurgical Knowledge had its own Transactions in 1794–1808, and the Royal Humane Society for the Recovery of Persons apparently Drowned had its own publications as well (1774–95). The repertoire of the medical press widened considerably, as in addition to London, Edinburgh societies established their own publications (see below), and even the Medical Society of Students had its own journal (1771–75). Besides specialisation, another, almost opposite new trend came about at the same time. It was connected with the dissemination of medical knowledge to larger non-­specialised audiences in the new

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spirit of the Enlightenment. The landed gentry and traditional professional classes participated in literate and scientific culture, especially in London (Shapin 1996: 101), and polite society readers of the time were enthusiastic to learn about new achievements and practices in medicine. They were catered for by the general periodical the Gentleman’s Magazine (1731–1922), established in London by Edward Cave (1691– 1754). He acted as the editor for more than two decades and was largely responsible for the policy of the magazine (Taavitsainen 2019a). This monthly publication lies on the boundary of the medical press but is relevant for two reasons. First, it reprinted articles on medical topics from other sources including the medical press. One of its earliest medical texts from 1731 is called ‘On the Spleen’ and deals with mental health. It was first issued in Ireland in the Weekly Register. It shows how medical knowledge was disseminated to educated members of society and provides access to the appropriation of medical matters and eighteenth-­century mindsets which are otherwise unreachable. Its medical texts were often sent by readers in dialogue with previous items. Especially lively was the discussion on polemical topics of societal impact such as the Gin Act, issued in 1751 (see Figure 18.3). Letters to the Editor were prominent in the new eighteenth-­century general magazine and give evidence of everyday medical worries and public health issues such as tobacco and snuff; tea was strongly opposed as unsuitable for the English diet according to the doctrine of ‘naturals’ in Galenic medicine. Everyday ailments such as worms and blisters received attention and popular recipes were a frequent item. Other burning issues included current diseases and epidemics, such as gout and pestilence. Smallpox inoculation was a subject debated in the Gentleman’s Magazine and elsewhere, including pamphlets (Taavitsainen 2020). By the mid-­eighteenth century the Gentleman’s Magazine had some 10,000 subscribers and some 15,000 readers (Porter 1985: 141).

1732–1800: Specialised Medical Periodicals in Edinburgh The centre of learned medicine shifted with the Scottish Enlightenment from London to the north, as the Edinburgh Medical Faculty (1726–) became the ‘cornerstone of the Edinburgh scientific enterprise and its crowning glory’ (Shapin 1996: 98; see also Emerson 2004). The eighteenth century was a period of fundamental reform in medicine as both the methodology and the theoretical basis underwent changes, and the practical side developed as well. It was a period of consolidation and diversification of medical periodical publication. Journals represented

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Figure 18.3  ‘Gin Lane’ by William Hogarth, a supporter of the Gin Act of 1751 (Courtesy of Wellcome Collection, Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0))

an increasingly important forum for distributing experimental scientific research results based on observation in accordance with the new science. The eighteenth century focused on ‘enquiry as a thought style’ with novel applications for clinical practice (Taavitsainen, Jones and Hiltunen 2019), and several new trends made use of the achievements of the previous century. A then-­current theory, inspired by microscopical assessments, viewed the human body as a machine and was fairly widespread in the literature (Ishizuka 2012). There was increasing awareness of the physiological importance of nerves as well as sensibility and the senses later in the century. Other changes included the rising importance of statistical assessment initiated by calculations of the benefits of the new method of inoculation that paved the way to probabilities as a basis for making medical decisions (Taavitsainen 2019b). Improvements in clinical practices developed with the breakthrough of laboratory medicine and the advent of new fields such as hygiene (Mikkeli 1999). In all, the eighteenth

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century made huge steps towards more modern medicine, and the medical press was instrumental in this process. Increasing professionalisation and disciplinary specialisation meant that articles were written by professionals for their peers, especially towards the end of the century. The target audience of the new publications was more limited to experts than the readership of Philosophical Transactions had been. Various institutions published new periodicals in their specialist fields. With these developments the medical press entered a new phase. The local press in Edinburgh became increasingly specialised in various sub-­disciplines, with surgery leading the way. Midwifery received increasing attention in the medical press (see the case study below), but its own journals only came about later. Apart from mainstream miscellanies, review journals and collections of medical book abstracts emerged as new kinds of publications.

Edinburgh Medical Journal The first issues of the new Edinburgh press were published in the early 1730s under the title Medical Essays and Observations. The first issue under that name came out in 1731, and it continued as Medical and Philosophical Commentaries (1773–95). The names have the same ring, but the society behind each was different, for the first twenty issues of Medical and Philosophical Commentaries were published by a Society of Physicians in Edinburgh. Infrequent changes of publication titles characterise the period of publication activities and are the reason why the collective title Edinburgh Medical Journal is generally used to refer to the short-­lived pioneering periodicals published by ‘Societies in Edinburgh’ (Atkinson 1992). Lefanu (1938) gives a separate entry for Medical Essays and Observations (1733–44), which was revised and published by a society in Edinburgh. It was principally dedicated to clinical and pathological case studies (Chalmers et al. 2016: 36). Another Essays and Observations with the subtitle physical and literary . . . was published by the Philosophical Society in Edinburgh (1754–65) and contained contributions from various other branches of knowledge besides medicine, including astronomy and agriculture. Because of the difficulty in establishing the individual lines of development by the titles only, it is necessary to probe deeper into the original sources and check the contents of the early volumes. This has proven a fruitful strategy as it opened up a different view. The contents of these early periodicals vary and show important new trends in the eighteenth-­century medical press in Britain.

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Figure 18.4  Andrew Duncan (1744–1828), editor of the first review journal collectively known as Edinburgh Medical Journal, etching by J. Kay, 1797 (Courtesy of Wellcome Collection, Public Domain Mark)

Novel Types of Medical Journals The umbrella term Edinburgh Medical Journal covers a variety of different traits and different goals. The main stream contains reports of new practices as predecessors of research articles, essays, case studies and book reviews. The increasing quantity of medical literature posed challenges in keeping up with its practical (and theoretical) advances, and review journals and abstract collections were launched as new types of periodicals with a more streamlined policy (see the earlier Weekly Memorials and Medicina Curiosa). Their focus was not so much on promoting research goals as helping medical professionals absorb what had recently been published in order that clinicians could keep abreast of new developments in the profession. The editor of the first review journal was Andrew Duncan (1744– 1828), an Edinburgh physician and the secretary of ‘our Society’. The model for his work came from Leipzig, where a periodical called Scientia Naturali et Medicina gestis had been established in 1752. It

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contained abstracts of recently published scientific and medical books at home and abroad, but only a few British books were mentioned, and even then only after a long delay. Duncan’s new journal was to remedy this situation. The first English-­language journal of abstracts, Medical and Philosophical Commentaries, was established in 1773 by, as usual, the vaguely worded ‘Society in Edinburgh’. In 1780 it was renamed Medical Commentaries and continued annually until 1795. Its circulation was impressive as it sold over 1,000 copies of each issue simultaneously in Edinburgh, London and Dublin. Judging by the figures, its readership must have included all types of practitioners from university-­trained physicians to barber-­surgeons and the new type of surgeons with Scottish or continental MD degrees, as well as apothecaries. It was not confined to the British Isles only but reached out even wider with translations into French, German and Dutch (Chalmers et al. 2016: 37). Thus, its circulation was geographically much wider than had been the case with other medical journals. Each issue had a preface with the editorial policy clearly stated. The journal was intended for busy clinicians and other medical doctors. The new periodical developed [a] scheme, better calculated for saving time in reading, and expense in purchasing books, [which] is a concise view of the books themselves. It cannot indeed be alleged that, from this or any other plan, the same advantages will be obtained as from a careful perusal of original works. But, by this means, those who have not leisure for extensive reading, may easily become acquainted with everything proposed as a discovery in medicine, and with the principal arguments by which it is supported. (ECCO, Medical and Philosophical Commentaries, introduction 1773, 7) Interestingly, this same idea had been expressed by the highly learned fourteenth-­century surgeon Guy de Chauliac in his important surgical work that belongs to the scholastic genre of compilations: ‘Euery man may not haue alle bookes, and if he hadde, it were irkesome or noye to rede hem and goodly to holde all þing in mynde’ (1971: 2). Avoidance of praise and criticism was an essential part of the journal’s policy. The early issues did not contain evaluation, but invited comments and suggestions for improvement. The policy statement is clear: [W]e propose to give a summary view of all the best medical books, and of all the remarkable medical papers contained in the

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the medical press 437 transactions of public societies, as soon after these publications shall appear, as the nature of the work proposed will allow. We will particularly endeavour to lay before our readers every thing which is proposed as a discovery or an improvement in any branch of medicine, but especially in practice. As it is not our intention to offer any opinion with regard to the general characters of books, we shall, on every occasion avoid, as much as possible, either applauding or condemning any author. (ECCO, Medical and Philosophical Commentaries, 1773, 9) The aim was to enable every reader to form their own opinion. Duncan considered the first issue ‘a trial’ and was keen for feedback, and he also welcomed medical news on ‘intended publications and any improvement’. The journal was well received and readers expected its continuation. The editor had no hesitation in fulfilling their wishes. The book reviews are fairly extensive, covering seven to twelve pages, written in the third person with detailed descriptions of the contents and some background context of the authors’ earlier achievements also included. After some years, however, the journal changed its policy. Instead of neutral descriptions, it began to offer critical appraisals of books, thus extending its scope. The reception was not, however, all positive, for readers wanted more case reports and, consequently, later issues of the journal contain sequences of patients’ case narratives. A policy change in 1794 gave a push to increasing the number of essays representing original work, and these contributions count as forerunners of research articles in several ways. For example, Medical Commentaries in 1795 contains articles such as ‘Of the effects of the Variolous Infection on Pregnant Women’ (see the case study below). In addition, foreign correspondents contributed regularly with news from different parts of the world; for example, the 1795 issue records news from as far away as Jamaica, Russia and America. However, the mode of writing remains much the same with third-­person accounts without explicit evaluation, except some words of praise such as ‘by an eminent physician’ in the introductions.

Summary and Developments post-­1800: Towards Present-­day Practices Dissemination of knowledge was slow until periodicals dramatically changed the situation in the last decades of the seventeenth century, and cutting-­edge science developed towards modern paths. London

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had been the hub for centuries, but the situation changed in the eighteenth century when the most important developments in the medical press took place in Edinburgh, where various societies took the lead with their own periodicals. The last decades of the eighteenth century brought innovative concepts and new types of journals which distributed knowledge of recent medical achievements and clinical advances among professional medical doctors. Review journals and collections of abstracts belong to the repertoire of the medical press even today. In the long diachronic perspective, however, the success story among the early scientific periodicals belongs to Philosophical Transactions. In contrast to Edinburgh periodicals which changed their names and policies several times in the eighteenth century, Philosophical Transactions has kept its name and policy as created in the seventeenth century ever since, but with slight modifications that became necessary when scientific publications grew and became more specialised. Philosophical Transactions adapted to the new situation by decreasing its medical content, while keeping it alive as one of the fields in its multi-­disciplinary composition. The developments continued steadily in the nineteenth century, and even today Philosophical Transactions Section B (Life Sciences) provides a peer-­reviewed publication channel with fast-­track delivery and open access policy. The call for papers invites original contributions, reviews and opinion pieces without specifying any medical subfields (see https://royalsoci​ etypublishing.org/rstb/for-­authors). In connection with the eighteenth-­ century medical press in Edinburgh, Dublin is mentioned as a distribution area. The first medical journal in Ireland, Collectanea Hibernica Medica, was very short-­ lived and produced only one issue in 1783 (Lefanu 1938: 58). It seems that Irish authors sent their contributions to Scotland; for example, two case studies, one from Galway and another from Downpatrick in Ireland, came out in the 1795 issue of Medical Commentaries in Edinburgh, thus providing a publishing forum for Irish practitioners. The second Irish periodical, Medical and Physical Essays, was established in 1808 and ran through six issues (Lefanu 1938: 8). Two periodicals that belong among the most prestigious present-­ day medical publications date from the nineteenth century: the Lancet and the British Medical Journal, from 1823 and 1840, respectively. These serve as signposts of a new period that paved the way to radically new developments. The modern paradigm of evidence-­ based medicine with clinical insights and a high degree of specialisation and teamwork emerged on a larger scale in the twentieth century, when the medical press branched off into highly specialised

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case study 15 : knowing the parts of woman 439 periodical publications according to their disciplines or subdisciplines (Taavitsainen and Hiltunen, forthcoming). The pace of publication has reached another level, as cutting-­edge medical articles are nowadays published online in almost real-­time in English, the lingua franca of medicine and science, for their worldwide discourse community.

Case Study 15: Knowing the Parts of Woman: How Knowledge about Reproduction and Childbirth was Communicated in the Earliest Medical Press Richard J. Whitt Introduction The field of midwifery underwent profound changes between the late seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, for this period witnessed a gradual increase in male surgeons being present at normal births. Whereas childbirth had normally been a gynocentric event, with only the parturient woman, her midwife and close female acquaintances allowed in the birthing chamber, the introduction of instruments (such as the forceps, crochet and vectis) and the growing insistence of many surgeons that they possessed medical knowledge superior to that of midwives meant that, by the end of the eighteenth century, normal childbirth was viewed as a medical phenomenon worthy of a surgeon’s attention (detailed historical overviews are provided in works such as Donegan 1978; Donnison [1977] 1988; Wilson 1995; Allison 2021). The midwifery treatises published during these centuries reflect the varied and contested epistemic spaces regarding who was best suited to advise on the best birthing practice: from the learned physician with his extensive knowledge of classical authors such as Galen and Hippocrates, to the practising midwife with her in-­depth personal experience and empathy, to the male surgeon (or man-­midwife) with his scientific knowledge increasingly combined with personal experience. The predominant publications of the medical press (Philosophical Transactions, the Edinburgh Medical Journal and the more popular Gentleman’s Magazine) reflected the perspective taken by the latter group exclusively, and they provide additional textual insight into how exactly the burgeoning class of man-­midwives conceptualised and disseminated their knowledge. But whereas the treatises served more of a didactic function, the articles appearing in the medical press allowed these practitioners to exchange information and case studies with one another. It is worth examining how the authors of childbirth-­themed articles positioned themselves textually and linguistically in relation to the topics they discussed.

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Figure 18.5  The Gentleman’s Magazine, January 1731 (Creative Commons Licence, courtesy of Wikimedia)

Scope and Method of the Study Two questions are the main concern of the current study: what exactly did the authors who published about midwifery or childbirth-­related matters in the medical press write about, and how exactly did they write about these things? Corpus linguistic m ­ ethods – t­hose involving the computer-­assisted linguistic analysis of machine-­readable texts (see, for example, Biber et al. 1998; Baker 2006; McEnery and Hardie 2012; Weisser 2016) – were employed to answer

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case study 15 : knowing the parts of woman 441 Table 18.1  Details of the ad hoc childbirth-themed corpus used in the current study Publication

Number of texts

Wordcount

Philosophical Transactions, 1665–94 (EMEMT) Philosophical Transactions, 1700–1800 (LMEMT) The Edinburgh Medical Journal (LMEMT) The Gentleman’s Magazine (LMEMT) Total size of corpus

11

10,729

19

33,914

11 3 44

 8,007  2,432 55,082

these questions. Specifically, relevant sub-­corpora of the Early Modern English Medical Texts 1500–1700 (EMEMT) and Late Modern English Medical Texts 1700–1800 (LMEMT) corpora (Taavitsainen et al. 2010; Taavitsainen et al. 2019) were examined using the WordSmith Concordancer 8.0 (Scott 2020). The Philosophical Transactions sub-­corpus of the EMEMT plus the Scientific Periodicals (including the Philosophical Transactions and the Edinburgh Medical Journal, which first came out in 1733 under the title Medical Essays and Observations) and the General Periodicals (including the Gentleman’s Magazine) sub-­corpora of LMEMT were examined, and the texts dealing particularly with matters of childbirth and human reproduction were extracted to create an ad hoc corpus for this study. Table 18.1 presents an overview of this corpus, and further details concerning the larger sub-­corpora can be found in the documentation accompanying EMEMT and LMEMT. A wordlist was generated for each of these corpora, and then the most frequent content words that most closely relate to the topic of childbirth across the four categories of publication were identified. The two most frequent terms were part and woman (see Appendix for more details), and a concordance was generated for each of these terms, as well as their respective plural forms parts and women. The next task was to discover exactly what claims were made about part(s) and woman/women, and more precisely, what provided the basis for these assertions; that is, what kinds of knowledge were the authors drawing on in their writings, and how was this knowledge realised linguistically? This involved not only the linguistic expression of evidence, known as evidentiality (see, for example, Chafe and Nichols 1986; Aikhenvald 2004; Taavitsainen 2009; Whitt 2016), but also more general expressions of knowledge or implicit expressions of knowledge (see Plappert 2017; 2019), and generally, anything indicative of the author’s ‘epistemological positioning’ (Bednarek 2006). To avoid as far as possible preconceptions about the (historical) data,

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a bottom-­up approach was adopted (Pahta and Taavitsainen 2010). On the one hand, this involved an examination of the linguistic analysis of the text surrounding the keyword (500 characters in the concordance output, thus ensuring a discourse context above and beyond the sentence-­level); on the other, it also involved a categorisation schema that took shape as the analysis progressed, although the resultant categories are fully in line with previous research done in the field. The classification scheme included the following categories: Belief, Conditionality, Inference, Knowledge, Observation and Report.

Knowing the Parts of Woman: The Epistemic Contexts of Scientific Reporting in the Earliest Medical Press To illustrate the above classification scheme, perhaps it is best to first examine a case where no epistemic qualification exists: These two ligaments embrace the rectum. The broad ligaments stretch much less in height when the uterus is developed in women with child; the anterior and posterior reduplications of the peritonaeum are almost effaced (1775_SC-­PER_EMJ3_Vol3_0351-­0358.txt: ‘Observations sur la Structure des Parties de la Génération de la Femme; par Mr Portal. Vide Histoire de l’Academie Royale des Sciences, Année 1770. 4to, Paris’, Edinburgh Medical Journal, 3, 1775, 353–4) This case provides a simple statement of fact without any indication of things such as source of information or the writer’s certainty or uncertainty regarding the assertion. Contrast this with the following statements, all of which contain some sort of epistemic qualification (signalled by the underlined words or phrases): Belief First, He thinks that Women never breed Stones so large as Men; the contrary of which seems to be manifest by this Operation . . . (1694_pt18_103­4.txt: Basil Wood, ‘An Account of a Stone of a Prodigious size extracted by Section out of a Woman’s Bladder, now living, on the Eighth day of November, 1693’, Philosophical Transactions, 18, 209, 1694, 104)1

All corpus examples are cited using the filename plus some standard bibliographic information. The keywords are highlighted in bold, while the relevant epistemic words or phrases are underlined.

1

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case study 15 : knowing the parts of woman 443 Conditionality And if the greatest part of these Vessels are Arteries, or other Vessels, that immediately receive liquors from them . . . (1669_pt4_1043–7.txt: Edmund King, ‘Some Observations Concerning the Organs of Generation’, Philosophical Transactions, 4, 52, 1669, 1045) Inference as I have met with in Steatomatous and Artheromatous Tumours, with several Hydatides, of various Sizes, containing a yellowish Serum, the least of ’em bigger than an Orange, with several large Pieces of Membranes, which seem’d to be Parts of the distended Ovary. (1724-­ 1725_SC-­ PER_PT_ Vol33_0008-­0015.txt: Robert Houstoun, ‘An Account of a Dropsy in the left Ovary of a Woman, aged 58. Cured by a large Incision made in the Side of the Abdomen’, Philosophical Transactions, 33, 1724, 10) Knowledge then the Section, if the Chyrurgeon be so bold as to venture on it, must be made so wide, as wholly to cut through the short Neck of the Bladder, and to divide likewise some part of its thin membranous Substance, which is known to be of the most dangerous consequence in cutting the Stone, and to be avoided as certain Death to the Patient. (1693_pt17_817-­24.txt: ‘Dr. Mullineux his Account of a Stone of an extraordinary bigness, spontaneously voided through the Urethra of a Woman in Dublin’, Philosophical Transactions, 17.202, 1693, 823) Observation IN the Month of July, 1731, I was call’d to the Woman mentioned, and found her Body very large and hard, and under great Complaints, as tho’  it  were Travel-­ Pains that occasion’d the Disorder . . . (1743_GEN-­ PER_GM_Vol13_0484.txt: John Marshall, ‘An extraordinary Case of a Fœtus, 13 Years in the Body of a Woman’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 13, 1743, 484) Report MR PORTAL, after mentioning a variety of different opinions that had prevailed among anatomists respecting the parts subservient to generation in women, proposes to give some observations of his own on this subject. (1775_SC-­PER_EMJ3_Vol3_0351-­0358.txt: ‘Observations sur la Structure des Parties de la Génération de la Femme; par Mr Portal. Vide Histoire de l’Academie Royale des Sciences, Année 1770. 4to, Paris’, Edinburgh Medical Journal, 3, 1775, 351)

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All of the above examples of explicit epistemic marking feature the epistemic word or phrase in the immediate linguistic context of the keyword, either immediately preceding it or following it in an adjoining clause (as is the case with the Knowledge and Observation examples). Sometimes, however, the distance between the keyword and the relevant epistemic marker is more distant (such as in a completely separate clause), and the relationship is present, but it is more implicit: we saw a ripe child and its secundines lying in the lower part of it, a little to the right side. The child, placenta, and umbilical rope were intire, and the membranes were as usual after birth. The woman’s uterus had its fundus raised as high as the navel, with its substance soft and spongy as is common in pregnants, nothing preternatural appearing in its foreside . . . (1756_SC-­ PER_EMJ2_Vol2_0338-­0341.txt: Alexander Munro, ‘A Child escaping at a Rent of the Womb into the Abdomen’, Edinburgh Medical Journal, 2, 1756, 340) Here we can see that the epistemic phrase we saw – which signals an ­observation – ­immediately (and explicitly) concerns the statement about ‘a ripe child’. It should be clear from the context, however, that the subsequent discussion about the woman’s uterus was equally informed by the author’s same observation, even if the epistemic marker occurred in a different sentence. Finally, there were a few instances in which multiple epistemic sources were indicated, as this contribution to the Philosophical Transactions makes clear: other contents of the Abdomen appear’d (nearly) in their natural State, but on the right Side within the Os Ilium a Child presented itself, which was attach’d to the Ilium and neighbouring Membranes by a Portion of the Peritonæum, in which the Fimbria and Part of the right Fallopian Tube seem’d to lose itself. (1746_SC-­ PER_PT_Vol44_0617-­ 0621.txt: Starkey Myddleton, ‘An Account of a Child being taken out of the Abdomen, after having lain there upwards of 16 Years, during what time the Woman had 4 Children, all born alive’, Philosophical Transactions, 44, 1746, 620) On the one hand, the presence of the verb appear points to what is described as being physically visible, that is, accessible via observation. At the same time, the verb seem points to inference, so the final statement concerning ‘Part of the right Fallopian Tube’ is an inference resulting from observable, visually accessible evidence. As to the frequency of epistemically marked cases of part(s) and woman/ women in our corpus, Table 18.2 presents an overview of the frequencies. Discussions of woman/women appear just as likely to receive some form of

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case study 15 : knowing the parts of woman 445 Table 18.2  Frequency of epistemic marking in the corpus Keyword

Frequency of epistemic marking (explicit/implicit/unmarked)

part

42

7

75

Type of epistemic meaning Implicit 5 Observation 1 Inference 1 Report Explicit 2 Belief 2 Conditional 10 Inference 1 Knowledge 16 Observation 8 Report 3 Observation + Inference

parts

21

5

55

Implicit 1 Inference 2 Observation 1 Report 1 Belief + Inference Explicit 2 Conditional 6 Inference 10 Observation 1 Report 1 Belief + Inference 1 Observation + Inference

woman

39

4

45

Implicit 4 Observation Explicit 4 Inference 12 Observation 22 Report   1 Knowledge + Observation + Report

women

14

0

14

Explicit 2 Belief 1 Conditional 1 Inference 5 Observation 5 Report

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Table 18.3  Frequencies of epistemic marking in each publication. Normalised frequencies at rate per 1,000 words are provided in brackets. Publication

Keyword

Total cases of epistemic marking

PT1600

PT1700

EMJ

GM

part parts woman women Total

49 26 43 14 132

10 (0.93) 5 (0.47) 12 (1.12) 9 (0.84) 36 (3.36)

29 (0.86) 18 (0.53) 22 (0.65)   3 (0.09) 72 (2.12)

  9 (1.12)   3 (0.37)   6 (0.75)   2 (0.25) 20 (2.50)

1 (0.41) 0 3 (1.23) 0 4 (1.64)

epistemic marking as to remain unmarked; discussion of the admittedly more general part(s), however, finds epistemic marking in the minority of cases. Markers of direct observation, the reports of others, and the inferences drawn by the authors themselves dominate throughout. This should come as no surprise, seeing that these are some of the epistemic hallmarks of the empirical model of scientific inquiry exemplified in these medico-­scientific publications, which replaced the scholastic model of s­ cience – ­with its emphasis on learned authors and textual ­synthesis – ­that preceded it (Siraisi 1990; Shapin 1996; Taavitsainen 2009; Whitt 2016). Finally, Table 18.3 presents an overview of the spread of epistemic marking across the publications represented in the corpus (some of the distinctions made in Table 18.2 above are not featured here). Both raw and normalised frequencies are provided, given the varying sizes of each publication’s respective sub-­corpus. Although the numbers are all quite small, they do suggest that there has been a slight decrease in overt epistemic marking from the seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries. Epistemic marking is certainly still part of scientific/medical writing (see, for example, Hyland 1998), but perhaps this indicates the beginning of a shift in disciplinary cultures towards some types of knowledge not requiring any sort of epistemic qualification, alongside other strategies of epistemic implicature arising (Plappert 2017; 2019). Another point borne out by the data is that more specialised publications such as the Philosophical Transactions and Edinburgh Medical Journal prefer more varied and explicit signs of knowledge and knowledge sources than writings geared towards a general audience, such as the Gentleman’s Magazine. Space and time limitations constrain us from investigating these matters further, but hopefully this short study has highlighted some of the potential research areas that open up when one combines such seemingly disparate fields as the history of medicine, journalism, corpus linguistics and discursive studies of epistemology.

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case study 15 : knowing the parts of woman 447

Appendix Below is the output of the wordlists generated by WordSmith 8.0 for each of the study’s four sup-­corpora, showing how part(s) and woman/ women are the two content words shared most in common among all corpora. Please note that all function ­words – ­or grammatical ­items – ­have been omitted from these lists. Table 18.4  Wordlist generated from Philosophical Transactions, 1665–94, EMEMT sub-corpus N

Word

Freq.

27 46 49 50 52 56 57 65 66 79 80 82 83 87 88 89 91 92 99 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110

STONE BLURRED BLADDER TRANSACTIONS SEVERAL PART VESSELS PHILOSOPHICAL BODY SUBSTANCE TIME LARGE YEARS PARTS MADE DR BREASTS ACCOUNT WAY GREAT FOUND BEFORE WOMAN WERE UTERI UT THOUGHT STONES PASSAGE

47 29 27 26 25 24 23 22 22 18 17 17 16 16 16 16 16 16 14 14 14 14 13 13 13 13 13 13 13

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Table 18.5  Wordlist generated from Philosophical Transactions, 1700–1800, LMEMT sub-corpus N

Word

Freq.

43 52 53 56 59 63 66 70 73 79 81 82 83 90 91 93 99 101 104 105

TIME CHILD PART SMALL FOUND FŒTUS SIDE LITTLE GREAT YEARS RIGHT PARTS LARGE WOMAN LEFT MADE BLOOD MOTHER CASE VEIN

96 79 78 73 73 69 64 62 61 54 51 50 50 48 46 45 41 38 37 36

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case study 15 : knowing the parts of woman 449 Table 18.6  Wordlist generated from the Edinburgh Medical Journal, LMEMT sub-corpus N

Word

Freq.

26 37 41 51 52 53 56 61 62 69 72 74 78 80 81 84 85 86 89 92 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110

CHILD UTERUS TIME MR FOUND CASE PART OS MONTHS WOMAN LIFE PAINS DIFFERENT ANTERIOR YEARS SAMPLE PLACE PARTS LABOUR ARTICLE TAKEN STATE SMALL SIDE RENT NOW MOTHER LITTLE HIS GREAT FOUR DEATH DE CONTINUED BELLY

42 31 22 19 18 18 17 16 16 14 14 13 12 12 11 11 11 11 11 11 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10 10

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Table 18.7  Wordlist generated from the Gentleman’s Magazine, LMEMT sub-corpus N

Word

Freq.

26 34 35 36 44 45 46 47 48 50 51 53 55 58 59 60 63 65 68 69 70 71 72 77 78 80 81 84 87 88 89 90 91 92 94 95 96 97 98

CURE REMEDIES AUTHOR AT CHILD CANCERS CANCER WOMAN TREATISE SAID PART CANCEROUS WOMB SYMPTOMS SPECIES REASONS INCURABLE FOUND DISEASE CONSIDERED CASE YEARS WORK STAGE SAYS PRESCRIPTIONS PARTS NEW MET MEDICINE MEDICAL LONG JULY INSTANCES DISORDER DEATH CASES BREASTS BODY

13 8 8 8 7 7 7 6 6 6 6 6 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 5 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4 4

Chapter Nineteen

COMMENTING AND REFLECTING ON THE NEWS Edward Taylor

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omment on the ­ n ews – o ­pinion and analysis about news events, topical publications, policy, political or religious ideas, political figures or groups, or ‘the times’ in ­general – h ­ ad an ambiguous place in the early modern British press. Many publications disavowed comment as a source of fiction, partiality or meddling in state affairs that ran counter to ideals of truthful and respectable news. The Kingdomes Weekly Post (1643–44), for example, aimed to provide ‘­newes . . . ­without any gilded glosings, invented fixions, or flattering Commentaries’ (1, 9 November 1643, 1–2), while the British Mercury (1710–16) sought to avoid ‘All P ­ artiality . . . ­nor shall political Reflexions be allow’d any Room, the Design of this Mercury being to give a fair and equal Account of such Facts and Incidents as come within its Sphere’ (369, 2 August 1712, 3). However, the vehemence of such denials, which were a commonplace in newspapers, was a reaction to comment’s regular appearance in the serial press rather than a reflection of its absence. Many serials throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did provide comment for their readers, and often in ample quantities. Indeed, the place of serials in the wider ‘comment media landscape’ – the mixture of printed, manuscript and oral media through which comment was published and ­circulated – ­gradually shifted from marginal to central, and by 1800 was matching or even surpassing the primary medium of early modern comment, the printed pamphlet. The simplest way comment was included in serials was within news discourse: interpolating individual words, sentences or paragraphs of comment into news narratives to inflect them with analysis or opinion. This was a regular feature of n ­ ewspapers – ­for example, there were significant concentrations of comment-­heavy, partisan news in Civil War 451

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newsbooks, Exclusion Crisis newspapers, post-­1712 weekly journals, and newspapers in the era of the American and French revolutions. Comment-­heavy news was a deliberate newswriting strategy rather than a universal phenomenon, as many newspapers were essentially plain in style, including surprising cases such as the main thrice-­weekly newspapers during the ‘rage of party’ under Queen Anne, the Post Boy (1695–1736?), Post Man (1695–1730) and Flying Post (1695–1733). In a different way, comment also appeared within news discourse in the form of what might be called ‘reported’ or ‘embedded’ comment: when news reports contained quotations of texts such as petitions, proclamations or (from the 1770s) parliamentary debates that themselves contained the comment of others. In addition, comment was increasingly presented in the serial press in more overt f­ orms – ­being identified as comment, and distinguished from news. One early example can be found in John Dunton’s explanation for his decision to change his newspaper Pegasus (1696), which contained a comment section, into a full-­blown serial of comment: The Publick being so well supplied with News already by other Papers, the Undertaker of this hath thought fit to supersede his Endeavours of that Nature, that there may be more Room for the Observator, which hath been Universally well approved of. And the Reflexions being always upon the freshest Occurrences, there seems to be very little need of placing the Text before the Commentary[.] (2.1, 24 August 1696, r) By distinguishing ‘observator’ from ‘news’, ‘reflexions’ from ‘occurrences’, and ‘commentary’ from ‘text’, Dunton captured the growing salience of comment in current affairs discourse, both as a concept and as a separated form in practice. The idea that reports and discussions of news might be treated as different kinds of discourse came to prominence through print, especially in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Authors of serials (and pamphlets) developed techniques for demarcating and highlighting comment, including the deployment of keywords such as ‘observations’, ‘reflections’ and ‘remarks’ to denote comment on the news as something different from the news itself, and the physical division of news and comment between different publications or different sections of publications. The breakout moment was the emergence of ‘comment serials’ from the 1680s: a substantial wave of publications that were explicitly designed to present comment to readers, normally in the form of a dialogue or essay (Taylor 2020). Comment serials such as Roger L’Estrange’s Observator, James Welwood’s Mercurius Reformatus: or, The New Observator,

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commenting and reflecting on the news 453

Figure 19.1  Mercurius Reformatus: Or, The New Observator, 1, Wednesday 15 May 1689 (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin)

Charles Leslie’s Rehearsal and Jonathan Swift and others’ Examiner – and, in a minor way, Pegasus in its later g ­ uise – ­collectively affirmed the new role for comment in the press. The heyday of comment serials only lasted half a century, but by the 1720s the comment serial model had effectively been absorbed into the newspaper in the form of separate comment sections, which then became a regular feature for the rest of the eighteenth century and beyond. The result was to establish comment as a distinct category of writing about current affairs that ­persists – ­in the continuing use of the terms ‘news’ and ‘comment’ – to the present day. This chapter begins by considering what ‘comment’ meant in an early modern context. The main discussion that follows examines changing patterns of comment in the serial press between 1640 and 1800. The final section takes the Observator of John Tutchin and George Ridpath, a Whig comment serial that exemplifies the rise of comment, as a case study. Before beginning, however, a word about terminology and scope. Serials are interpreted using three broad

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categories: ‘newspapers’, referring to genres that had the primary appearance and function of providing news (including, for instance, newsbooks and weekly journals), and often included comment with that news; ‘comment serials’, referring to genres that had the primary appearance and function of providing comment (especially dialogues and essays), which presented comment in its own right; and ‘miscellanies’/‘magazines’, referring to genres that had the primary appearance and function of providing a mixture of features, and sometimes included comment as part of this mix. This scheme is not only helpful for approaching comment in the press, but also is offered more generally as an alternative to scholarship that, due to a long-­standing divide between the history of newspapers/journalism and the history of literary periodicals/periodical essays, has tended to distort interpretations of the press by subordinating political comment to both ‘news’ and the ‘literary’. With respect to scope, the discussion centres on developments in London serials, as London dominated comment publication in both scale and innovation, but some attention is also paid to the growth of comment in the non-­London press, especially during the eighteenth century.

Early Modern Comment What was ‘comment’ in early modern Britain? ‘Comment’ itself was not a dominant term in current affairs discourse, and no single alternative existed as an equivalent of ‘comment’ in its modern sense. However, a web of keywords developed in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to express the idea that opinion or analysis about the news was different from news narratives and reports (Taylor 2019: 30–49). These ­keywords – ­which were emblazoned in the titles of pamphlets and serials as explicit markers of what kinds of publications these were designed to b ­e – w ­ ere numerous and had varied connotations, but together demonstrate the development of an overt early modern idea of commenting on the news. This paralleled the similar and better-­known development of a web of keywords to indicate the news itself, including ‘occurrences’, ‘proceedings’, ‘affairs’ and ‘transactions’ (Brownlees 2011: 183–95; Arblaster et al. 2016). As the appropriateness of publishing comment on current affairs was contested, terms were borrowed from respectable fields such as historiography, science and religion, and carried connotations such as objectivity, analysis and formal controversy that legitimated discussion of the news. One of the most important new keywords was ‘observations’. This literally meant seeing or noticing something with care and attention

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commenting and reflecting on the news 455 to identify its key features, which imbued it with objectivity. In the early seventeenth century ‘observations’ had been used in various non-­ topical contexts, and generally referred to broad analytical points that could be extracted from a subject, with utility for readers. Scholarly textual commentary included ‘observations’ giving analytical lessons based on interrogating texts (for example, An Exposition of the Five First Chapters of the Prophet Ezekiel, with Useful Observations Thereupon, 1645), and historiography included ‘observations’ giving analysis based on historical events and biographies that provided moral lessons or political predictions (for example, Obseruations Vpon the Liues of Alexander, Caesar, Scipio, 1602). From the 1640s this sense of ‘observations’ was brought into current affairs pamphlets (for example, Observations upon Some of His Majesties Late Answers and Expresses, 1642; Some More New Observations Concerning the King and Parliament, 1642; Some New Observations and Considerations upon the Present State of Things in England, 1643). By the later Stuart period ‘observations’ had become a master-­noun for commenting on the news in both pamphlets and, importantly for this discussion, serials. Various comment serials carried the title ‘observator’ (literally ‘one who makes observations’), most importantly Roger L’Estrange’s Observator (1681–87), James Welwood’s Mercurius Reformatus: or, the New Observator (1689–94?) and John Tutchin and George Ridpath’s Observator (1702–12). These were all explicitly organs of comment. Other serials carrying the same idea, and contrasting ‘observations’ with terms for ‘news’, included Observations upon the Most Remarkable Occurrences in our Weekly News (1693, comment serial), New State of Europe, Both as to Publick Transactions and Learning, with Impartial Observations Thereupon (1701, newspaper with comment sections) and New Observator on the Present Times (1701, comment serial). In 1703 the Poetical Observator Reviv’d was conceived as ‘a Monthly Observator, in which I intend to make Remarks upon all Books and Pamphlets, and all other Publick Occurrences that I conceive are any ways prejudicial to the Church and Monarchy’ (April 1703, 4). The Reconciler (1713), another comment serial, contained ‘­Observations . . . ­Upon the state of the Crown . . . The State of the Church . . . And the State of the Nation as divided into Whigs and Tories’. A newspaper called the Weekly Medley . . . Containing an Historical Account of All News, Foreign and Domestic, Together with Observations on the Writings and Manners of the Age (1718–20) promised the ‘Justest Remarks and Observations I can, with Regard ­to . . . A ­ rticles of News’ (26 July 1718, 3). Through publications such as these, ‘observations’ was central to the establishment

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of comment within current affairs discourse by the early eighteenth century. The term remained prominent throughout the century: in 1785, for instance, the Daily Universal Register (1785–present; now The Times) noted that one function of a newspaper was to provide ‘observations on the dispositions of our own and of foreign ­courts . . . ­for the political reader’ (1 January 1785, 1), and the Spirit of the Times (1790) offered ‘a series of observations on the important events of the age’. A second major comment keyword was ‘reflections’, which, like ‘observations’, carried the core sense of a careful and objective mental process, but here based on thinking rather than seeing. This also originated in non-­topical contexts, such as morality and piety (for example, Horæ Consecratæ . . . Occasional Meditations and Gratulatory Reflexions upon Particular Providences and Deliverances, 1682; Rules for Conversation, or A Collection of Moral Maxims and Reflections, 1683), before becoming established as a term for commenting on the news in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. Among serials, the Dilucidator (1689) was a comment serial of ‘Reflections upon Modern Transactions’; the Master Mercury (1704), a newspaper, contained ‘A Faithful ABSTRACT of all the NEWS both Foreign and Domestick. With Plain and Impartial Reflections both on Persons and Things’, and a comment section called ‘The Reflector’; Mercurius Politicus (1705), a comment serial, contained ‘Reflections on the present State of AFFAIRS’; and the Orphan; With Reflections Political and Moral, upon All Material Occurrences, Foreign and Domestick (1716), a newspaper, had comment sections headed ‘Reflections’. Again, this keyword persisted: Anti-Jacobin (1797–98), for example, offered both an ‘Abstract of the important events of the week’ and ‘Such Reflections as many naturally arise out of them’ (Prospectus, 2). Space precludes full discussion of the many other comment keywords of the period, although a few may be listed. Some shared with ‘observations’ the idea of seeing or noticing, including ‘examinations’ and ‘remarks’, or with ‘reflections’ the idea of thinking, such as ‘considerations’ and ‘animadversions’. Others were drawn from scholarly inquiry (for example, ‘queries’, ‘causes’, ‘explanation’, ‘reasons’), controversy (for example, ‘vindication’, ‘defence’, ‘refuted’, ‘condemned’) or even genre (for example, ‘panegyric’, ‘satire’, ‘character’, ‘dialogue’). Of course, the objective, analytical and/or reputable impression of early modern comment that these terms collectively evoked was not a straightforward reflection of the nature of comment in practice. Terms such as ‘observations’ and ‘reflections’ were often used to provide a respectable cover for partisan opinion: from the Civil Wars to the age of

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commenting and reflecting on the news 457 Pitt and Fox, partisan agents both official and unofficial used the press to promote political causes, and deployed comment that defended political principles, lauded political successes or castigated political opponents. This was embraced by partisans on all sides: royalists, parliamentarians, Tories, Whigs, ministries and oppositions of various shades. However, there was also much analytical comment, especially after c. 1690 and in relation to foreign affairs, as the press examined the strengths and weaknesses of different countries during the many complex European wars for the benefit of British readers. Early modern comment included a broad range of opinion and analysis; perhaps more opinion and less analysis than implied by contemporary terminology, but a full spectrum of comment nonetheless.

Comment in the Serial Press, 1640–1800 Early ­newspapers – ­both corantos in the 1620s and the earliest domestic newsbooks of 1641–­42 – ­were structured as series of news reports, with comment limited to brief interpolations into the news discourse and occasional introductory notes about the credibility of news (Raymond 1996: 20–6; Brownlees 2011: 55–70). This is unsurprising, as the very idea of serial publication was invented for, and at this stage still wholly associated with, providing news. The first substantial appearance of comment in the serial press was in Civil War newsbooks (Raymond 1996; McElligott 2007; Taylor 2019: 64–88). In the 1640s and 1650s newsbooks were not the dominant medium for c­ omment – ­comment was more often published through individual ­pamphlets – b ­ ut nevertheless developed a sizeable place in the comment media landscape. Comment in newsbooks was overwhelmingly partisan, designed to boost royalists or parliamentarians in the propaganda war that accompanied the military war. Comment was frequently interwoven into news reports to present a particular party as virtuous or vicious, or successful or unsuccessful. For example, Mercurius Aulicus (Oxford, 1643–45), the flagship royalist newsbook of the First Civil ­War – ­and it should be emphasised that it was structurally a news serial, organised around the presentation of day-­by-­day ­news – ­augmented its royalist-­slanted news reports with everything from short interpolated comments to occasional full paragraphs of comment, which praised Charles I or Archbishop Laud or triumphed (prematurely) in overall royalist success in the war (for example, 1.15, 16 April 1643, 188; 1.47, 25 November 1643, 663; 12 January 1645, 1340). In addition, there were two important innovations relating to comment in Civil War newsbooks. The first was the tentative appearance

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of a kind of comment section in a substantial minority of newsbooks. Some authors, seeking to include more partisan content, borrowed structures already used in individual pamphlets as mechanisms for introducing direct portions of discussion into newsbooks (although these were not identified as comment per se). The most important was the preface: in effect, introductory comment sections appearing before the main body of a newsbook labelled ‘news’ or ‘intelligence’. Scholars have sometimes called these ‘editorials’ or ‘leading articles’, but this is anachronistic; contemporaries recognised them as ‘prefaces’ or ‘preambles’. They developed in 1643–44, most importantly in a group of parliamentarian newsbooks: Mercurius Britanicus (1643–46), Scotish Dove (1643–46), True Informer (1643– 45) and Spie (1644). The preface-­news formula was then adopted by other newsbooks, including Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer (1643– 49), Moderate Intelligencer (1645–49), Mercurius Melancholicus (1647–48), Mercurius Pragmaticus (1647–49), Mercurius Elencticus (1647–49), Moderate (1648–49), Perfect Summary (1649), Mercurius Politicus (1650–60), Perfect Passages (1650–53), Faithful Scout (1651– 55) and another Faithfull Scout (1659–60). In all of these newsbooks, prefaces were never a permanent fixture, but were at least a semi-­ regular feature for some of their run. Other structures borrowed from pamphlets to add comment into newsbooks included animadversions, a formal procedure for answering a text, used in Mercurius Aulicus, Mercurius Britanicus, Spie and Diutinus Britanicus (1646– 47); queries, the formal exposition of questions and answers, found in Mercurius Britanicus, Compleate Intelligencer and Resolver (1643) and Parliament Scout (1643–45); and ballads, which were a particular feature of the 1647–50 ‘Mercuries’ (of which more shortly). Although newsbook comment was always partisan, it took various forms: for instance, Mercurius Aulicus included a final section of numbered animadversions offering a royalist response to parliamentarian newsbooks; the Scotish Dove contained ethereal Presbyterian providential comment in prefaces; and the Moderate and Mercurius Politicus included prefaces of radical political theory. The second innovation was the development of newsbooks that, while outwardly presented as serials of news, were in practice filled mostly with comment. This was especially a feature of the ‘Mercuries’ of 1647–­50 – ­an extraordinary proliferation of newsbooks, mostly royalist, during the most revolutionary phase of the Civil Wars. ‘Mercury’ was a common but complex term for newsbooks, and had evolving connotations. The first newsbook labelled ‘Mercurius’ – Mercurius Aulicus – adopted the term in 1643 for its older connotations of

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commenting and reflecting on the news 459 respectable news-­ bringing, but the partisanship of Aulicus and its mid-­1640s successors led many to associate the term with the Roman messenger god’s other attributes of playfulness and deception. However, mid-­1640s ‘Mercuries’ remained recognisably news serials in content and structure, even while experimenting with ways to increase their partisanship and comment. From September 1647 a new wave of ‘Mercuries’, led by Mercurius Melancholicus, Mercurius Bellicus (1647–48), Mercurius Pragmaticus and Mercurius Elencticus, went further. They pushed the newsbook form to its limit: they usually began with a ballad containing a humorous take on the week’s news, often followed this with a prose comment preface, and sometimes even went beyond this, substituting comment for news for much of the substantive c­ontent – ­all while continuing to declare in subtitles that they were publications of ‘news’ or ‘intelligence’. These late 1640s Mercuries were not a coherent press category, and individual newsbooks varied from issue to issue in the amount of comment they contained, but at their greatest extent they were de facto vehicles of comment. Ultimately, however, the comment-­dominated Mercury did not endure; it essentially ceased in June 1650 when the republic suppressed royalist serials, and was never revived. The news-­in-­theory, comment-­in-­practice model was too generically unstable, and would no longer be necessary when comment’s place in the serial press became better established later in the century. In the 1660s comment all but disappeared from the serial press amid post-­Restoration restrictions. It returned during the Exclusion Crisis (1678–83), when topical print proliferated in the context of the new Whig–Tory partisanship and the collapse of press controls. Many newspapers of this period were partisan, and blended comment into the news (Randall 2006). However, the innovations that had seen comment tentatively acquire a stronger place in Civil War newsbooks were not repeated in Exclusion Crisis newspapers. This was partly because comment found a new outlet: the first wave of comment serials. Usually taking a half-­sheet folio format, comment serials were overwhelmingly filled with partisan comment on politicians, parties, policies and publications, and were in the vanguard of the public circulation of comment during the ‘rage of party’, alongside pamphlets. They are helpfully described as ‘comment serials’ because, simply, their central and self-­conscious function was comment (Taylor 2019: 107–27; Taylor 2020). Other terms that have been suggested are problematic: ‘journal of opinion’ is inaccurate because ‘journal’ referred to various miscellanies and newspapers, and ‘periodical essay’ is unhelpful because the primary genre of comment serial between 1680s and

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1700s was the dialogue, which only gave way to the essay in the 1710s, and because ‘periodical essay’ became more associated with serials of morals and manners in the tradition of the Tatler and Spectator (of which more shortly). The key moment for the emergence of comment serials was early 1681, at the height of the Exclusion Crisis, when pressure for partisan propaganda was especially intense in the build-­up to the Oxford Parliament and its aftermath (Newton 1934; Schwoerer 2001: 44–75, 134–73; Goldie 2008; Taylor 2019: 133–48). This led to the creation of regular publications of direct comment, which could be more intensive ‘paper weapons’ than individual pamphlets of comment or newspapers that filtered partisanship through news reports. Leading the way was Heraclitus Ridens (1681–82), a Tory (and probably government-­ sponsored) comment serial that was designed as ‘A D ­ iscourse . . . ­where many a True Word is spoken in opposition to all Libellers against the Government’. Taking its name from the paradoxical idea of Heraclitus (the proverbial weeping philosopher) laughing, which signified its joco-­serious style, the serial comprised dialogues between characters named Jest and Earnest, who discussed the dreadfulness of the Whigs. Dialogue, especially in its humorous mode drawing on the second-­ century Greek satirist Lucian, was already an important medium for commenting on the news in pamphlets (Halford 2016). Other dialogue serials followed over the next few months, including Democritus Ridens (Whig) and, most importantly, Roger L’Estrange’s Observator, a Tory serial that lambasted the Whigs several times a week for many years, ultimately reaching nearly 1,000 issues. Early comment serials such as these evolved out of the pamphlet and newspaper traditions, and shared much content and function with them, such that they have sometimes been regarded simply as ‘newspapers’ themselves. However, this does not take account of the significant break in form that they ­represented – ­in the case of L’Estrange’s Observator, through being an explicit ‘serial of observations’, rejecting the standard newspaper structure and embracing the ­dialogue – ­which a longer-­term perspective demonstrates launched a new tradition that would be increasingly differentiated from newspapers. The first wave of comment serials ended in 1683, when the serial press more widely was suppressed, although L’Estrange’s Observator continued until 1687 as a government-­sympathising title. The 1690s were a more fallow period, although James Welwood established Mercurius Reformatus: or, the New Observator in 1689 as a Williamite successor to L’Estrange’s serial, defending the new government in essays (Furdell 1998), and a range of minor serials (some quoted in the

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commenting and reflecting on the news 461 discussion of ‘observations’ and ‘reflections’ above) indicate that the comment serial idea was consolidating. A substantial wave of comment serials then arrived after 1702, during the fiercest phase of the ‘rage of party’ under Queen Anne (Downie [1979] 2008; Taylor 2019: 163–80; Marshall 2020). The most prominent early titles were John Tutchin’s Observator (1702–12, Whig dialogue), Daniel Defoe’s Review (1704–13, Whig/moderate essay) and Charles Leslie’s Rehearsal (1704–09, Tory dialogue). By this period, comment serials had become very different in form, function and content from newspapers, and this was acknowledged by contemporaries; in 1707 one observer distinguished the ‘printed News’ and these three comment serials as ‘3 Papers besides, relating to the Government’ (Miege 1707, I: 137). Later, they were joined and/or replaced by other comment serials such as the Examiner (1710–14, Tory essay), written by Jonathan Swift in 1710–11, Arthur Maynwaring’s Medley (1710–12, Whig essay) and Richard Steele’s Englishman (1713–15, Whig essay). There was a near-­continuous run of comment serials on both sides of the party divide in the first two decades of the century. As already noted, by the 1710s comment serials were generally essays rather than dialogues. The e­ ssay – a­ nd a linked form, the l­etter – w ­ as technically a kind of rambling, discursive prose, as opposed to formally structured argument. The essay/letter was also used in this period by the Tatler (1709–11) and Spectator (1711–12, 1714), successful serials of morals and manners that spawned a run of successors in the 1710s and 1720s and beyond (Graham 1930; DeMaria 2005; Italia 2005; Taylor 2019: 180–94). There is a strong case, which cannot be elaborated here for lack of space, that the Tatler and Spectator can be helpfully approached as ‘moral comment serials’, as their form and their titles – Spectator was a virtual synonym of Observator and Examiner, after ­all – ­situated them as an adaptation of and reaction to the main comment serial tradition that focused on the news and politics (which is henceforth referred to as ‘political’). The new moral serials did not displace political comment ­serials – ­examples such as the Tory True Briton (1723–24) and pro-­Walpole Free Briton (1729–35) continued to be ­published – b ­ ut they did help to consolidate the essay/letter as the primary genre of political comment in serials. For the rest of the century, political and moral essays/letters would exist as parallel traditions in the serial press. Although they inhabited the same kinds of ­publications – ­in newspapers and magazines, as we shall see, as well as comment s­erials – ­they were usually easy to distinguish in practice. Nevertheless, some serials blended both traditions, such as the Entertainer (1717–18), which offered essays containing ‘Remarks upon

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Men, Manners, Religion and Policy’. This chapter’s focus will remain on political comment, but moral comment will be acknowledged where necessary. During the heyday of comment serials, comment initially drifted away from newspapers, which concentrated on the news ‘proper’; post-­1695 newspapers were very different from their Exclusion Crisis predecessors in their renewed emphasis on foreign affairs and reduced partisanship. However, this shift towards a tighter idea of news was also accompanied by the beginnings of a reshaping of newspaper form to provide a more overt place for comment (Taylor 2019: 90–7). This was partly driven by continental developments: French-­ language monthly foreign-­ affairs newspapers published in the Netherlands, such as Mercure Historique et Politique (1686–1782), included sections of ‘Reflexions’ after news from each country, and these were both translated into English (for example, Present State of Europe, 1690–1738) and imitated in original English-­language newspapers (for example, New State of Europe, 1701). These newspapers also spearheaded the growth of analytical comment in the British serial press, where partisan comment had previously been dominant. The reshaping of newspaper form was also driven, of course, by comment serials, which provided a model for inserting comment sections into newspapers. The example of Pegasus – initially a newspaper with an ‘Observator’ comment section, before becoming a comment ­serial – ­has already been mentioned; another is the Flying Post and Medley (1714), which contained ‘Two Parts, the first of News Foreign and Domestick, [while] In the second part of the Paper, the Author will handle such Political Subjects as from time to time he shall have in view’ (1, 27 July 1714, r). Building on this scattered experimentation in newspaper form, the key decade for the full emergence of comment sections into newspapers was the 1710s (for newspapers to 1750, see Black 1987; Harris 1987; Harris 1993; Taylor 2019: 97–103). In the vanguard of this development were the new post-­1712 six-­page weekly newspapers, which had more space to fill than earlier half-­sheet folio newspapers. By 1720 six-­ page weeklies often contained introductory comment sections of one or two pages, for instance in Applebee’s Original Weekly Journal (1714– 37?), Read’s Weekly Journal (1715–61) and Mist’s Weekly Journal (1716–37), before the main news coverage, and then usually concluding advertisements. These comment sections owed something to prefaces, but they differed by drawing directly on the essay/letter form from comment serials. For example, Nathaniel Mist explained that his weekly journal ‘always begins with some entertaining Essay, either

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commenting and reflecting on the news 463 upon the Times, or else the Behaviour and Follies of Men, and the rest is a fair and impartial History of the whole World for a Week’ (234, 20 April 1723, 1376). These newspapers forged a ‘tripartite’ model of essay/letter-­news-­advertisements, with introductory comment better established than it had been in Civil War newsbooks. As Mist suggested, the subjects of introductory essays/letters drew on both political (‘the times’) and moral (‘behaviour and follies of men’) comment, as in comment serials. One famous political example is the series of ‘Cato’s letters’ by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon in the London Journal (1719–44) and British Journal (1722–31?) in 1720–23, a run of pseudonymous ­essays – ­pseudonyms were a standard feature of letters in ­serials – ­that criticised the government’s handling of the South Sea Bubble from a radical Whig perspective. The growing use of the essay/ letter also had implications for the authorship of comment. Until this period, most comment in serials (apart from reported comment) was written by the authors of serials themselves. Although essays/letters were often composed by authors or those they hired, the form created the possibility for others to submit comment to newspapers, and this became increasingly common during the century. Beyond the introductory essay/letter, six-­page weeklies also contained other varieties of comment: many included political verse, and the news content became more partisan and comment-­heavy than newspapers had been since the Exclusion Crisis. Between the 1720s and 1750s the tripartite model of newspaper became widespread, not only in weeklies such as the Universal Journal (1723–24), Common Sense (1737–43?), Westminster Journal (1741–59), Old England (1743–53) and Remembrancer (1747–51), but also extending to daily and thrice-­ weekly newspapers such as the Daily Journal (1721–37), Daily Gazetteer (1735–97), Champion (1739– 43?), Universal London Morning Advertiser (1743–44) and Citizen (1756–57). As late as 1751 the London Advertiser and Literary Gazette (1751–53), a daily newspaper, stated that ‘Custom has established it as the present Plan of a Paper of this kind, that it consist of three distinct Parts; An Introductory Dissertation, Articles of Intelligence, and Advertisements’ (4 March 1751, 1). Introductory essays/letters, often containing political comment, were now entrenched within the generic conventions of newspapers. Primarily as a result of this, newspapers would become increasingly central in the wider comment media landscape during the eighteenth century. By the 1730s newspapers had effectively displaced comment serials; where comment in the 1680s was most powerfully circulated through separate comment serials, which had the space to develop concentrated and regular doses of

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comment for public consumption, by the 1730s it was most effectively presented in newspapers, where it benefited from the larger audiences that newspapers enjoyed. This shift is neatly exemplified by the Craftsman (1726–50), the famous anti-­Walpole serial. This began as a comment serial, consisting of an essay on a political or moral subject, but after forty-­four issues was turned into a newspaper of the tripartite model, with an initial comment section. This was the opposite journey to Pegasus, and reflected the changed media landscape. By the 1730s only two major political comment serials remained, the pro-­Walpole Free Briton (1729–35) and Hyp Doctor (1730–41), before the form effectively ceased. The discussion so far has focused on the London press. The emergence of a non-­London serial press, especially in Edinburgh, Dublin and provincial towns and cities across England, was a product of the late seventeenth and (especially) early eighteenth centuries. At its heart was the provincial newspaper, which often included comment, although like much of its content this comment was usually derivative: the Newcastle Weekly Mercury (1722–23), for instance, reprinted Cato’s letters in the 1720s (Black 2019: 28), and the Salisbury Journal (1736–1800+) reprinted essays from the Westminster Journal and Old England in the 1740s. In contrast, there were few political comment serials printed outside London, apart from a few Edinburgh and Dublin reprints of London titles such as the Review, Examiner and Medley, and some minor original titles such as a brief Edinburgh Observator (1705–06). However, comment emerged as an important component in the third major category of serial, the miscellany/magazine, which proliferated in this period and had a strong non-­London dimension. The magazine, in particular, was invented in the 1730s as a form of miscellany that was initially designed as a monthly compilation (literally ‘storehouse’) of essays from the London press for transmission to the provinces. Early magazines, led by the Gentleman’s Magazine (1731–1922) but also including titles such as the London Magazine (1732–85) and Scots Magazine (Edinburgh, 1739–1817), therefore republished political (and moral) essays/letters that had previously appeared in London newspapers and comment serials. Over time, magazines began to include more original material, including political essays, for instance in the British Magazine (1746–50) and Newcastle General Magazine (1747–60), and by mid-­century the magazine had joined the newspaper as a major vehicle for comment on the news. In newspapers, the place of comment continued to strengthen after 1750. Indeed, by 1800 the newspaper rivalled and had even begun to displace the pamphlet as the main location for published comment

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commenting and reflecting on the news 465 (Peters 1980; Black 1987; Barker 2000). The main specific form of comment in newspapers continued to be the essay/letter, but there was a shift away from the tripartite model towards the placing of essays/letters towards the middle or end of the newspaper, especially with the rise of the four-­page, four-­column newspaper whose first page was dominated by advertisements. This development has often been interpreted in terms of a growth of ‘letters to the press’ as the main manifestation of newspaper comment, a form developing between the 1740s and 1760s before dominating for the rest of the century (Harris 1995c; Kristiansen 2020). This is slightly overstated: in another way, this was simply a reorientation of the essay/ letter model that had already been established for several decades, with comment continuing to take either political or moral subjects and to be written under pseudonyms. The main ­difference – ­aside from increased ­scale – ­is that they were increasingly authentic letters from readers, submitted by politicians or members of the public, such that newspapers began partly to act as genuine organs of democratic debate, representing rather than merely informing public opinion. Better-­known examples include the ‘Britannicus’ letters in the London Evening Post from the late 1740s, and the ‘Junius’ letters in the Public Advertiser in the late 1760s and early 1770s. Other examples of London newspapers containing political comment letters include the Evening Advertiser (1754–58), Baldwin’s London Journal (1762– 1836), Middlesex Journal (1769–90?), Morning Chronicle (1769– 1865), General Advertiser (1776–90?), Evening Mail (1789–1868) and Courier (1792–1842). The non-­London press also adopted the form, including both derivative items, such as ‘Junius’ letters reprinted in the Dublin Mercury (1766–67?), and, increasingly, original items; the imprint of the Newcastle Journal (1739–88) informed readers that ‘a lion’s mouth is fixed at the entrance of our office, where letters, essays, &c. may be dropped with the utmost privacy’. Moreover, ‘letters to the press’ were not the only form of political comment in post-­1750 newspapers: they also contained political verse, extracts from pamphlets and comment-­heavy news, especially after parliamentary reporting was permitted in the 1770s. In addition, comment serials experienced a revival in the London press in the 1750s and 1760s, albeit never returning to their earlier prominence (Peters 1980; Spector 1992). Post-­1750 comment serials were essays like their predecessors, but were now published in the new format of six-­page pamphlets. As before, political and moral comment inhabited the same genre, and although this wave was spearheaded by a moral comment serial, Samuel Johnson’s Rambler (1750–52), a new

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tradition of political comment serials also developed. These tended to have shorter runs than their predecessors, mostly being written for particular political moments rather than as long-­term comment papers, although during these moments they set the terms of political debate. The first political comment serial in this era appears to have been the Protester (1753) and the longest-­lasting was the Monitor (1755–65), both of which were anti-­ministerial papers founded by Richard Beckford. Alongside the Monitor, there were important clusters around the ascendancy of William Pitt in 1756–57, including the Test (1756–57) and Con-Test (1756–57), and around the ascendancy of John Stuart, Earl of Bute in 1762–63, including the Auditor (1762–63), Briton (1762–63) and North Briton (1762–63); the latter was John Wilkes’s famous comment serial, which landed him in trouble for criticising George III. There were a few comment serials in the 1770s and 1780s, including the Whisperer (1770–72), Crisis (1775–76), Scourge (1780) and Citizen (1788), but the revival of comment serials did not endure. The second half of the eighteenth century also witnessed the consolidation of the miscellany/magazine tradition, with comment on the news remaining an important element. Many generalist magazines on the Gentleman’s Magazine model continued to include political essays as part of their mixed content. These included the British Magazine (1760–67), Court, City and Country Magazine (1761–65), Town and Country Magazine (1769–96), Westminster Magazine (1772–85) and Monthly Magazine (1796–1843?), and, outside London, the Edinburgh Magazine (1757–62), Dublin Magazine (1762–65), Birmingham Register (1764–65) and County Magazine (Salisbury, 1786–92). A good example is the Royal Magazine (1759–71), which explicitly offered comment on the news in the form of ‘observations’, ‘reflections’ and ‘remarks’: a large account will be given of the political and other transactions in different parts of the world, especially in our own ­country . . . ­with apposite reflections and remarks where necessary. And that the reader may form a more adequate idea of foreign transactions, we will endeavour to explain the interests and connections of the several powers of ­Europe . . . ­And as many particulars will appear unintelligible to most ­readers . . . ­we will use the utmost diligence to explain and elucidate them by proper remarks and observations. (1, July 1759, 2) Its first issue included items such as ‘An Essay on the Advantages resulting to Great Britain from her late Conquests’, ‘Remarks on the

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commenting and reflecting on the news 467 Glory of a Nation, its great Advantages, and the Manner of acquiring it’ and ‘On the Invasion threatened by the French’, amid pieces on Pompeiian antiquities, magnetism and the inoculation of horned cattle. In addition, with the development of more specialist magazines after mid-­century, some new titles were dedicated to political comment. A stark example was Political Controversy, or Magazine of Ministerial and Anti-Ministerial Essays (1762–63), a weekly magazine that reprinted the text of the era’s comment serials side-­by-­side. Others included Political Register (1767–72), Freeholder’s Magazine, or Monthly Chronicle of Liberty (1769–70), Freemen’s Magazine, or the Constitutional Repository (Newcastle, 1774), North British Intelligencer, or Constitutional Miscellany (Edinburgh, 1776–77), Whig Magazine, or Patriot Miscellany (1779) and Political Herald and Review (1785–86). This survey concludes with the 1790s, a decade of high political drama and debate following the French Revolution. Newspapers in London and the provinces were now prominent in public political discussion, supporting both ministerial and anti-­ministerial causes, and disseminated comment variously through forms such as political ‘letters to the press’ and reports of parliamentary debates. This hyper-­politicised period produced a few new comment serials, which were generally longer than their predecessors and/or resembled miscellanies in their presentation of a mixture of comment-­related items. One example is Tomahawk! (1795–96), which promised that ‘Without encroaching upon NEWSPAPERS in the article of INTELLIGECE [sic], which THE TOMAHAWK is precluded by its plan from ­giving . . . ­it will ­discuss . . . ­every LEADING TOPIC OF THE MOMENT’. Its aim was to equip conservatives, through its mishmash of features, with arguments to deploy against their opponents: ‘All those who feel themselves aggrieved by REVIEWS, or NEWSPAPER OBSERVATIONS, may here throw THE TOMAHAWK with effect, at the malignant brains of their rancorous adversaries’ (27 October 1795, 1–2). Another conservative serial, Anti-Jacobin, or Weekly Examiner (1797–98), promised a ‘WEEKLY EXAMINATION’ of the errors of the press to satisfy demand for ‘some public channel of information on which they could confidently rely for forming their opinion’ (The AntiJacobin or Weekly Examiner, Prospectus, 1799, 3), and included a mixture of animadversions, essays, historical analysis and poetry. Other comment serials or comment serial/miscellany hybrids in the 1790s included English Freeholder (1791), Briton (Newark, 1793– 94), Picture of the Times (1795), Philanthropist (1795–96) and Lynx (1796–97?). In addition, there were new London magazines that were

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designed for political comment, such as Patriot, or Political, Moral and Philosophical Repository (1792–93), Constitutional Magazine and True Briton’s Friend (1793–94), Political Magazine (1794) and AntiJacobin Review and Magazine (1798). Some non-­London magazines also had high comment content, including the Watchman (1796), Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Bristol-­based miscellany of news and comment; Cabinet (1794–95), a Norwich-­based radical periodical containing essays and verse; and the Genius of Kent (Canterbury, 1792–95), a more general monthly featuring original political essays/letters. By 1800 the serial press had developed a panoply of ways to publish comment on the news and had come to the heart of the comment media landscape.

Conclusion Despite the efforts of purists and naysayers, comment on the news was an increasingly prominent and distinct feature of the serial press in seventeenth- and eighteenth-­century Britain. In 1640 there was no discrete understanding of ‘comment’ as a category of current affairs discourse, and the very idea of serial publication was strongly associated with providing news. By 1800 an explicit concept of comment on the news had emerged through keywords such as ‘observations’ and ‘reflections’, and it was taken for granted that serials were organs of comment as well as news. Comment’s place in the serial press shifted significantly over the period: developing tentatively in Civil War newspapers of the 1640s and 1650s before falling back; emerging strongly in the new comment serials between the 1680s and 1720s; shifting back towards newspapers from the 1710s, where it remained entrenched for the rest of the century; also being published increasingly through magazines from the 1730s onwards; and appearing again in a revived comment serial tradition in the 1750s and 1760s. The overall effect of these changes was to move serial publications from a marginal place in the wider comment media landscape to its centre.

Case Study 16: John Tutchin and George Ridpath’s Observator Edward Taylor A good case study for comment in the press is the Observator of John Tutchin and George Ridpath, published in 1,065 issues between 1 April 1702 and 30 July 1712 (Horsley 1973; Taylor 2020). The Observator was a Whig

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case study 16 : tutchin and ridpath’s observator 469 comment serial that was designed to attack Tories, High Churchmen, Jacobites and ­ papists – ­ for Tutchin and Ridpath, all constituting the same nefarious ­faction – w ­ ho were threatening to subvert the ‘ancient constitution’ that protected Englishmen’s rights and liberties. Initially published weekly, from May 1702 the Observator usually appeared twice a week, on Wednesdays and Saturdays. ­Tutchin – a ­ Whig public figure best known for a bit part in the 1685 Monmouth rebellion and for publishing Whig poetry and pamphlets in the ­1690s – ­was its first author, and wrote around 560 issues over five-­and-­a-half years. As he was an ‘Old Whig’, who remained faithful to pure 1680s Whig ideals and opposed the ‘Modern Whigs’ who served in William III’s ministry, the new comment serial cannot have been a propaganda project of the era’s primary Whig politicians, the Whig Junto, who were ‘Modern Whigs’ of the sort Tutchin despised: ‘What is it to poor England whether the Procurers of Her Ruin be Modern Whiggs or Old Tories?’ (1.76, 13 January 1703, r). Tutchin had links to Whigs in the print trade, especially the printer-­bookseller John How, but there is no reason to believe that Tutchin himself was not the driving force behind the publication. Its immediate context was the accession of the Tory-­leaning Queen Anne in March 1702 and the prospect of a Tory political revival, which necessitated a Whig response. The Observator attracted controversy; Tutchin survived a number of legal and physical threats, including prosecution for seditious libel in November 1704, and was only silenced by his death in September 1707, which was ­perhaps – ­although this is ­uncertain – ­a consequence of being beaten up by a Tory gang a few months earlier. The Observator was then taken over by another Whig, George Ridpath, a Scottish pamphleteer and author of the Flying Post newspaper. After around 500 further issues, the imposition of stamp duty in 1712 forced the paper to close. The Observator was a self-­conscious part of the fledgling comment serial tradition. Tutchin deployed the language of ‘observations’ to describe his serial, declaring that ‘My Business is to make Observations, and to draw Conclusions from occurring Circumstances’, and looking forward to a time when ‘we shall be so Happy in our Publick Affairs, that there will be no need of Observations’ (3.41, 12 August 1704, r; 3.98, 24 March 1705, v). As already indicated, this was the third major Observator, after Roger L’Estrange’s Tory Observator in the 1680s and James Welwood’s Whig New Observator in the 1690s. Indeed, Tutchin referred to L’Estrange as ‘My famous Predecessor’ and ‘The first Observator’ – remarkable given that L’Estrange was his political enemy (1.69, 19 December 1702, r; 4.16, 26 May 1705, r). More generally, Tutchin’s Observator was part of a wider phenomenon of dozens of minor ‘Observator’ serials between the 1680s and 1720s, which collectively incarnated the comment serial phenomenon (Taylor 2019: 148–63). Tutchin also adopted the dialogue form that had been favoured by L’Estrange and others. This was cast between characters named the ‘Countryman’, an honest but

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ignorant Englishman named ‘Roger of Coverly’, who travelled to London twice a week to gather the news, and the ‘Observator’, a learned patriot who represented Tutchin himself, and who offered observations on what the Countryman brought to him. Through this dialogue, Tutchin constructed a semi-­fictionalised persona whose very literary function was to comment on the news. The Observator’s comment was all designed to promote its partisan Whig goals, although this took a wide range of forms in practice. There was extensive character assassination of its political enemies, who were presented as malicious, self-­ interested traitors with unjustifiable principles. For instance, Tutchin explained that A High-Churchman, is the Weather-­Cock of a Steeple, turn’d about by the Wind of Secular-­ Interest . . . ­ whose Mouth Vomits Wild-­ Fire, instead of Divinity . . . ­ ­ he’s for Passive-Obedience, Non-Resistance, and Soveraign Will and Pleasure, and other the Instruments of Slavery. (1.25, 18 July 1702, r). There was a strong emphasis on answering Tory publications. ‘Since the Jacobites and Papists take the Liberty to Write against the Government, the Rights of the Kingdom, and the Hannover Succession; I shall continue to oppose them’, he wrote; ‘I only catch the Fire-Balls of Contention in my hand, and throw ’em back at the heads of those who first flung ’em’ (3.67, 6 December 1704, v). There was much discussion of foreign affairs, analysing and triumphing in the progress of the War of the Spanish Succession, and sometimes offering policy recommendations. Another important feature was the prominence of constitutional principle: the repackaging and representing of Whig constitutional t­heory – ­what the Countryman referred to as ‘Whigish Notions of Liberty and Property, the Interest, Constitution and Laws of old England’ – to the public (1.28, 29 July 1702, r). This Observator aligned with the ancient constitutionalist strand of Whig thought, with a heavy emphasis on English history: how the English constitution had operated in the past was how it should operate now. ‘My way is to look back into former Times’, Tutchin wrote, ‘for if we do not know what our Constitution and Priviledges were Ab Origine, we cannot tell what Encroachments are made upon ’em now’ (3.99, 28 March 1705, v). The Observator was one of the best-­known publications of its ­day – ­a fact obscured partly by the dominance of serials by Defoe, Swift, Addison and Steele in accounts of the period, and partly by a contemptuous view of its quality (Tutchin has been presented, by both contemporaries and historians, as coarse and ignorant). It was understood by contemporaries as one of the most ­prominent – ­albeit, for many, i­nfuriating – p ­ ublic voices of the Whigs, despite its unofficial status. One Tory pamphlet, for instance, stated:

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case study 16 : tutchin and ridpath’s observator 471 I­ . . . ­intend to Confront a Paper, which I think I may call the Mouth-­Peice [sic] of a whole Party: being tacitly acknowledged as such, by their fondness ­thereof . . . A ­ nd therefore, if not directly? Yet accidentally, the Speaker of the Faction. (Reflections on the Management of Sir George Rooke, 1704, 2) Tory opponents often linked the Observator to Defoe’s Review as twin Whig mouthpieces: ‘a Pair of Republican Orators, Mercenary Hirelings, and Weekly Scriblers of the Party’ (Memorial of the Presbyterians, 1706, sig. A2v). It prompted a slew of reactions in print, including a run of Tory comment serials that explicitly cited the need to counter the Observator’s comment: the Poetical Observator (1702–03), Heraclitus Ridens (1703–04), Rehearsal (1704–09) and Moderator (1710). Tutchin’s trial in 1704 was a cause célèbre, attracting crowds that spilled out into the streets around the Guildhall. The Observator’s fame even reached across time and space: a 1726 pamphlet printed in Philadelphia, The Observator’s Trip to America, had John Tutchin as ‘Mr Observator’ being reunited with Roger the Countryman across the Atlantic, it being revealed that Tutchin had falsified his own death in 1707 and sailed to America. At their height in the early eighteenth century, comment serials such as the Observator lay at the heart of the paper wars that characterised the ‘rage of party’.

Chapter Twenty

NEWSPAPERS AND WAR Nicole Greenspan

Introduction Newspapers and war were intimately connected. The origins of London newspapers can be traced to war: the corantos of the 1620s and 1630s were based on English translations of continental newsletters, principally devoted to the Thirty Years War (Brownlees 2011: 25–55; Boys 2011). The Civil Wars of the 1640s saw the emergence of regular weekly newsbooks, which provided wartime coverage. Newsbooks, and later the daily, bi-­weekly and tri-­weekly newspapers of the eighteenth century, were important vehicles for political and civic engagement, and mobilisation of public support during wartime (Raymond 1996; Barker 1998; Bickham 2009; Harris 1995a; 1995b; 1995c). Newspapers could also serve as instruments of public diplomacy, printing information and commentary in the hopes of shaping political and military responses to events (Helmers 2016; Peacey 2016; Slauter 2009: 763–4). In reporting on war, newspapers shaped its contours, providing context and commentary, and creating a dynamic space for advocacy, opposition, critique and debate. Coverage of war depended upon a number of factors, which changed and evolved over time. It was common to reprint items across newspapers, which could cause confusion if reports were in error. Geographical distance and wartime conditions, such as postal interruption, could delay the transmission of information. Another major influence was the ebb and flow of state censorship. In 1641 the traditional mechanisms of press licensing collapsed, launching a period of exponential growth in print and news coverage during the Civil Wars that followed. In the wake of the regicide, the new republic suppressed most royalist newsbooks by the end of 1649; Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate went 472

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newspapers and war 473 even further, stamping out almost all newsbooks in the autumn of 1655 (Wilcher 2001: 289–98; Potter 1989: 17–22). The Restoration ushered in a new wave of press censorship in 1662, until the final lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695. For much of this period the only printed newspaper was the official London Gazette, established in 1665 (Raymond 2003: 324–63). After 1695 newspaper titles multiplied in London and spread to the provinces (Bickham 2009; Barker 1998; Black 1987; Gardner 2016). The eighteenth century also saw the expansion of the print markets in Scotland and Ireland, which previously depended heavily on imports and reprints from London (Brown 2012; Barnard 2006; Munter 1967). By the late eighteenth century newspapers balanced local, national, international and global news. Recent advances in digital humanities and print cultures provide exciting opportunities for examining the development of newspapers. In particular, full-­text editions of newspapers available through various partnerships, projects and institutions, including the British Library, make it possible to search by keyword and phrase. As more and more titles become available in this format, digital texts can open new research directions and dramatically enhance our understanding of the circulation of news and its conduits (Brownlees 2016; Dooley 2016). Full-­text editions are particularly useful for the study of war, enabling searches for specific military leaders, locations and battles, among other possibilities. At the same time, understanding how contemporary readers would have encountered the news, especially during wartime, requires another approach. For readers, newspaper editions were individual texts in their own right, and reports were placed in the context of and in relation to the other items in the issue. The close connections between newspapers and war offer rich avenues for exploration. They also present significant challenges. The period between 1640 and 1800 saw regular warfare, including domestic and international wars, colonial conflict and global imperial warfare. This chapter focuses on a series of conflicts in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: the civil and imperial wars of the 1640s and 1650s, the Glorious Revolution (1688–91), the 1745 Jacobite rebellion and the American War of Independence (1775–83). The chapter also includes a case study on the newsbook Mercurius Politicus and the conquest of Jamaica (1655). Together, these conflicts enable us to examine the ways in which newspapers shaped the coverage of war, as well as the influence of particular wartime conditions on the circulation and presentation of news.

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Newsbooks and the Wars of the 1640s and 1650s In the 1640s newsbooks proliferated and provided ongoing coverage of the Civil Wars in multiple arenas. Newsbooks were published weekly and consisted of four or eight pages, which would sell for one or two pennies. Some titles lasted only one issue, while others ran regularly for years; the longest-­running was Marchamont Nedham’s Politicus, published weekly for the decade 1650–60. In 1649 over fifty titles were printed, with print runs of 250 up to 1,000 or more (Raymond 1996: 233–5, 324–35). Issues included a wide variety of materials that produced a textured view of war, including correspondence from soldiers and officers, accounts of battles, official declarations, editorials and poems. Readers could follow the march of troops, become familiar with different regions and terrain, move through battlefields and sieges, and trace casualties and prisoners. These sources were in dialogue with one another, often with editorials or editorialising providing a broader interpretative context. The structure and organisation of newsbooks also informed war coverage. News was organised by date of occurrence or receipt, rather than topic, which meant that news could be spread throughout the edition. Following news of war required reading through each page, sifting through incomplete, conflicting and unverified reports, and incorporating corrections and updates. This practice of tracing, comparing and evaluating news accounts within particular issues, let alone across multiple issues and titles, is vital to our understanding of contemporary news culture. Newsbooks in the 1640s and 1650s were highly polemical; editors and journalists believed that in addition to offering information it was necessary to advise readers how best to understand it (Raymond 1996: 127–83; Brownlees 2011: 97–116; Greenspan [2012] 2016: 3–9). As highly partisan publications, newsbooks sought to mobilise support for the war effort. Some wars generated more controversy in the press than others. For example, republican newsbooks portrayed the Cromwellian conquest of Ireland (1649–51) as a just response to the 1641 rebellion and a necessary means of preventing future assaults from a savage and bloodthirsty Catholic enemy (O’Hara 2006). More controversial was the Cromwellian invasion of Scotland, a Protestant nation and one that had joined the English Parliament in war against Charles I. Cromwell’s army brought a press on its march and printed justifications to legitimise the conquest. In July 1650, for example, the Declaration of the Army of England Upon their March into Scotland was printed in Newcastle and dispatched to Scotland and northern England. The Declaration was also reprinted in newsbooks, including

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newspapers and war 475 the 22 July issue of Perfect Diurnall of some Passages of Parliament and the 25 July issue of Severall Proceedings, to maximise its circulation. The invasion and conquest appeared in newsbooks and pamphlets as manifestations of Providence and evidence of divine punishment for Scotland’s continued support of monarchy and rejection of the godly republic (Spurlock 2007; Greenspan [2012] 2016: 13–38). In preparation for the invasion, the republic sponsored Nedham’s Politicus, which launched in June 1650 and included weekly editorials placing the conquest in a broader political, religious and historical framework. Politicus also employed John Hall, a well-­known polemicist who accompanied Cromwell’s army to Scotland as a correspondent during the conquest (Peacey 2004b: 199–200). As part of the conquests of Ireland and Scotland, Commonwealth agents took control of local presses, printing material favourable to the new republic. In December 1649, for example, the Cork press, established in 1648 to print royalist propaganda, began printing the Irish Monthly Mercury, which was reprinted in London. Intended to glorify the Cromwellian conquest, it lasted only one issue before it was succeeded by the equally short-­lived Irish Mercury in February 1650, after which imports and reprints from London dominated the Irish print market (Gillespie 2005: 64–5). Similarly, the conquest of Scotland involved harnessing Scottish presses to print pro-­Commonwealth material, including the first regular newspaper printed in Scotland, Mercurius Scoticus, which ran from July 1651 to January 1652. Thereafter, as in Ireland, much of the Scottish news market consisted of imports from south of the border and reprints of London papers in Leith and Edinburgh, including Politicus (Spurlock 2011). The conditions of war could hinder the circulation of information, and diverging or competing accounts could create confusion and uncertainty. In September 1649, for example, reports spread that Cromwell’s forces had broken the siege of Drogheda and crushed the enemy, though stoppage of the post (not uncommon in wartime) prevented timely corroboration. It took about two weeks for Cromwell’s report of 16 September to circulate in newsbooks. It was a brutal subjugation (Gentles 2007: 392–8). After Drogheda refused to surrender, Cromwell’s troops stormed the town; ‘I believe we put to the sword the whole number of the Defendants, and I do not think 30 of the whole number escaped with their lives’ (Perfect Diurnall of some Passages in Parliament (PDPP), 1 October 1649). Royalist newsbooks disputed reports of the defeat at Drogheda, insisting that Commonwealth forces had been repelled and dismissing accounts to the contrary as

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forgeries not to be trusted (Mercurius Elencticus, 1 October 1649; Mercurius Pragmaticus ( for King Charles II), 2 October 1649). Such disputes highlight both the challenge of obtaining timely and accurate updates during wartime and the polemical capacity of newsbooks. When royalist publications eventually confirmed Cromwell’s victory at Drogheda it appeared not as a defeat of the town’s defenders but as a savage massacre of women and children. Not only were they guilty of systematic murder, but Commonwealth forces also dismembered and mutilated civilians, ‘cutting off their Members, and peeces of their flesh, which they wore in their Hats two daies after’ (Mercurius Elencticus, 15 October 1649). This was a damning description, as such barbarity was usually associated in the English press with Irish Catholics (Noonan 1998; O’Hara 2006). The public forum for criticism of the Commonwealth shrank shortly thereafter, as most royalist newsbooks were suppressed by the end of 1649. Though some royalist print occasionally slipped through, the average 10–12 newsbooks in weekly circulation were generally loyal to the republic (Raymond 1996: 73–8). In the early 1650s Commonwealth newsbooks brimmed with triumphant accounts of the conquests of Ireland and Scotland, to which were added the subjugation of royalist rebellions in the colonies, including Barbados and Virginia, and victory in the first Anglo-­Dutch war (1652–54). Conversely, Cromwell’s next military venture, an assault on the Spanish empire in 1655 known as the Western Design, was a dramatic setback. The fleet, under the command of Generals William Penn and Robert Venables, set sail in December 1654 with the objective of seizing Hispaniola. Instead, the troops suffered humiliating defeat before Santo Domingo. Rather than return in failure the commanders turned to Jamaica, which they seized quickly, though high mortality and low morale impeded the development of the new colony (Pestana 2017). As it reached print in newsbooks, defeat became victory. Accounts held that Commonwealth troops had triumphed at Hispaniola, taking Santo Domingo and capturing the lieutenant-­general (Perfect Diurnall of some Passages and Proceedings, 30 July 1655; Faithful Scout, 17 August 1655). Moreover, most newsbooks erroneously presented Jamaica as a thriving settlement (see, for example, Perfect Account, 15 August 1655). The practice of reprinting items across publications gave widespread circulation to such reports, which took time to correct. As ships moved among ports in the Caribbean, New England and the Continent, however, they brought with them more accurate accounts of the state of the colony. By late September these reports started to find their way into newspapers. Daniel Border, editor of the Faithfull

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newspapers and war 477 Scout, devoted much of its last issue on 28 September to the Western Design. Refuting prior accounts of vigorous planting at Jamaica, Border informed readers that a ‘hot and infectious climate’ caused rampant illness, and many had died simply ‘for want of sustenance and provisions’. Previously, some editors, such as Henry Walker, agreed to withhold material that could give advantage to Spain (Perfect Proceedings of State-Affairs, 6 September 1655). Yet in late September even Walker began to print material that questioned the official narrative of bravery and success. In an editorial in the last issue of Certain Passages of every Daies Intelligence, also published on 28 September, Walker named the Protector and his council as the bodies concerned with ‘the carriage of affairs in the West Indies’, suggesting that the regime itself could be held ultimately responsible for the debacles in the West Indies. Whether or not Walker, Border and other editors would have continued to print material critical of the Design and Protectorate is unclear. In October the Cromwellian regime suppressed most newsbooks save those of Marchamont Nedham, who created a second title, the Publick Intelligencer. Increased censorship hindered unrestricted information about the status of the Jamaica settlement from reaching print. It also inhibited discussion and commentary on the Protectorate’s declaration of war against Spain later that month. In addition to concern about taxes and other measures necessary to maintain forces on both sides of the Atlantic, war also had important implications for trade. In September Philip IV had retaliated with an embargo against the Protectorate, and newsbooks, including Daniel Border’s, had already begun to inform readers that the Spanish had targeted English merchants in reprisal (Faithful Scout, 21 September 1655; Perfect Proceedings of State Affairs, 27 September 1655). Suppressing newsbooks thus reduced the availability of regular outlets for public information, discussion and debate that could potentially damage support for the Protectorate, the continuation of the Design and a costly war against Spain.

Restoration and Glorious Revolution The restoration of the monarchy in 1660 brought the reimposition of pre-­publication censorship with the 1662 Licensing Act. Three years later the London Gazette emerged as the government’s official newspaper. Published twice a week and consisting of two pages divided into two columns each, the Gazette was often the only newspaper in operation for much of the next thirty years. The same was true for Scotland

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and Ireland; Scottish and Irish booksellers and printers largely sold news reprinted or imported from London (Brown 2012; Gillespie 2005: 75–97). The Licensing Act required periodic renewal, however, and there were short periods during which it lapsed, or as had happened in 1641, during which the instruments needed for enforcement broke down. The Glorious Revolution occasioned one of those periods. In violation of both the Licensing Act and a separate 1680 proclamation prohibiting unlicensed newspapers, between December 1688 and March 1689 more than half a dozen titles appeared, seeking to satisfy the demand for news about political and military developments and taking advantage of the collapse of political structures and institutions (Schwoerer 1977b; Walker 1974: 691–5). Some, such as the Orange Gazette, were reprinted in Scotland as well (Mathison 2005: 148). Upon William of Orange’s landing in England on 5 November 1688, James II proscribed the publication of news and public discussion of events, including William’s defence of his arrival. Enforcement involved seizing presses, confiscating printed material and manuscript newsletters, and monitoring coffee houses (Pincus 2009: 151–2). These efforts were not successful, due to the great demand for news coupled with the reluctance of the London Gazette to provide readers with information and updates about what the official newspaper itself presented as a military invasion. The 8 November 1688 issue, for example, began with James II’s November declaration against ‘this invasion’ by an ‘Army of Foreigners and Rebels’, which aimed at ‘nothing less than an Absolute Usurping of Our Crown and Royal Authority’. The king enjoined subjects to unite ‘in the Entire Suppression and Repelling of those Our Enemies and Rebellious Subjects’. The issue then moved on to international news from a variety of places including Frankfurt, Cologne, Brussels and Paris, before reporting the arrival of 400–500 Dutch ships on the south-­western coast of England at Torbay. Approximately 500–600 soldiers had already landed, and ‘it is said the Prince of Orange is come ashore’. The Gazette also reprinted a Dutch list of the horse and foot regiments accompanying the Prince of Orange, which totalled 14,352 with a fleet of 635 ships. The issue then concluded with the breezy announcement that the Duke of Modena’s envoy had had audiences with the Prince of Wales and Princess Ann, and an advertisement for a reward for the return of the Duke of Northumberland’s lost ‘old ugly shag Spaniel’ (London Gazette, 8 November 1688). The Gazette’s limited information and inconsistent sense of urgency were both traditional elements of its role as an official publication and customary forms of news reporting. Yet the demand for news

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newspapers and war 479 during this tumultuous period, which also saw the collapse of press regulation, created opportunities and markets for newspapers. On 12 December, the day after James fled the capital, the London Courant put out its first issue announcing its mission to ‘rescue the truth’ and fill the void of information. The new titles, which also included the London Mercury, the Orange Gazette and the Universal Intelligence, were supportive of William and his cause and provided regular updates on the course of the revolution. Among the first major news items was the eruption of violence, real and imagined, between Protestant supporters of William and Catholics loyal to James. The first issue of the London Mercury on 15 December, for example, reported the pillaging of Catholic houses and chapels in London. After seizing what items of value they could carry, including ‘Money, Household Goods, and Writings’, the mob then ‘marched down the Strand with Oranges upon their Sticks, crying for the Prince of Orange’. A subsequent issue advised readers that armed crowds looted and burned Catholic houses in Edinburgh, plundering James’s chapel in Holyrood House and burning the contents at the market cross (London Mercury, 22 December 1688). Attacks against Catholics, who were closely linked to the support of James, spread to the provinces in England, Scotland and Ireland as well (Harris 2006: 373–5, 422–9; Pincus 2009: 254–73). Some of this was in response to the so-­called ‘Irish Fright’, which, as reported in the 21 December issue of the English Currant and elsewhere, involved rumours that James II’s Irish Catholic troops had risen against Protestants in Yorkshire, Nottingham and elsewhere in England, burning towns and slaying inhabitants, including women and children. A similar ‘Irish fright’ in Scotland reportedly had 20,000 Irish ‘putting all to Fire and Sword’, though ‘this is hoped to be nothing but a False Alarm, that has been through England’ (London Mercury, 31 December 1688). Though these unlicensed newspapers supported the new regime, like his predecessor, William believed that an unregulated press could be dangerous, particularly in a time of war and revolution. This became increasingly evident as unlicensed newsbooks informed readers about parliamentary proceedings. In reporting on the proclamation of William and Mary as king and queen, the official newspaper focused on the ‘Universal Acclamations of Joy by the Multitudes of People which crowded the streets’ (London Gazette, 14 February 1689). The Gazette omitted the Declaration of Rights, vaguely referred to as ‘an Instrument in Writing’ presented to the monarchs. Other newspapers reported on the Declaration, including the London Intelligence and Orange Gazette, both published on 12 February. Parliamentary

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proceedings were considered politically sensitive, and the capacity of newspapers to serve as venues of public discussion and debate could threaten the still fragile new government and buoy James’s supporters. By the end of March 1689 most newspapers apart from the Gazette had been suppressed (Walker 1974: 695–6; Schwoerer 1977b: 564–6). Yet the Gazette’s monopoly position was not to last, and in 1695 the expiration of the Licensing Act ushered in a new period of newspaper proliferation.

Newspapers and the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion The early eighteenth century saw an increase in the overall number of titles and their spread from urban centres to the provinces, including in Scotland and Ireland (Harris 2007; Barker 1998: 122–46; Gardner 2016: 15–46; Barnard 2006; Brown 2012). The 1745 Jacobite rebellion accelerated some of these developments and also introduced innovations. The rebellion, which aimed to overthrow the Hanoverian monarchy and restore James II’s line to the thrones of England and Scotland, began on 19 August 1745 in the Scottish Highlands. Jacobite forces quickly captured territory, including Edinburgh, and the following month they won the battle of Prestonpans. In November the Jacobite army marched south to invade England. Initially the newspaper response to the rebellion was uneven. After the lapse of licensing laws newspapers increasingly became more politicised, and by the mid-­eighteenth century they were publishing material critical of the government and Hanoverian monarchy. After the Jacobite victory at Prestonpans on 21 September, however, even opposition papers, such as the London Evening Post and Newcastle Courant, printed denunciations of the rebels and declarations of support for the Hanoverian regime (Harris 1995a; 1995b; 1995c). For much of the rebellion, information, including the location of armies and actions of the troops, was unclear, unreliable and uncertain. For example, one August issue of the Caledonian Mercury, published in Edinburgh, printed a series of reports on the state of the rising, which taken together advanced a confused picture. One announced that ‘the Highlanders’ needed more men to engage the king’s forces, and had ‘threatened to burn and destroy’ the land of all those who refused to join. Another report stated that the army at Inverness was poised to expand and would be joined by Scottish and French troops, as well as ‘several of the well affected Clans’. Still another account declared that ‘the Highlanders, despairing of Success, have offered to lay down their Arms on Promise of Endeavours to obtain them a Pardon’ (Caledonian

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newspapers and war 481 Mercury, 29 August 1745). Even months later the status of the rebellion could remain unclear. ‘We are in great confusion’, the Newcastle Courant acknowledged, which spurred great demand for information: ‘All that is minded by the Generality is News’ (Newcastle Courant, 30 November 1745). Contributing to the uncertainty was the organisation of newspapers, which largely retained the customary practice of printing news according to location, source and date. By the 1740s, however, the size and format of newspapers had evolved. Newspapers comprised two or four sheets, which were divided into two to four vertical columns of often cramped text with little separation of items. Finding news related to the rising thus meant scanning pages and reading through columns, and assessing the state of the rebellion involved comparing reports and dates of news items. As the rebellion wore on, some newspapers began to introduce bolder and more prominent headlines, grouped by topic and subject, to enhance visual definition and make news of the rebellion easier to follow. The 14 December issue of the Ipswich Journal, for example, included headings labelled A to K, which included ‘French Transports &c designed for Scotland’ (A), ‘Marshal Wade’s Army’ (D), ‘the Duke of Cumberland’s Army’ (E), and ‘Loyalty, Plots, Commitments, &c’ (G). While this did not solve the problem of conflicting or uncertain accounts, it enabled readers to chart different aspects of the rebellion as it developed in multiple arenas. The demand for news sparked the creation of new titles, including the Whitehall Evening Post and London Courant. The Eton Journal launched in October 1745 and lasted through the end of the rebellion until May 1746. The circulation of individual titles also increased during this period (Harris 1995b: 7–8; Harris 1987: 57). Some provincial papers could beat competitors, especially those from London, to press during wartime, taking advantage of their proximity to sites of action. Following the Jacobite occupation of Derby in December 1745, for example, the Derby Mercury was able to print first-­hand accounts of the experience and sought to cultivate correspondents who could provide reports from other locations on the rebels’ march. Coverage in the 13 and 20 December issues of the Derby Mercury enabled readers, who might be far from the action or unfamiliar with the landscape, to experience the destruction, devastation, intimidation and terror wrought by the invaders who, between 4–5 December, took over the town. When the paper, which missed its ordinary printing schedule on 5 December, resumed publication the following week it announced an ‘Account of the Conduct and Proceedings of the REBELS, during

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their Stay at DERBY, which may be depended upon for Facts’. As the Jacobites flooded into the town, the inhabitants surrendered: ‘Bells were wrung, and several Bonfires made, to prevent any Resentment from ’em, that might ensure on our shewing a Dislike of their coming among us.’ The rebels quickly seized weapons, food and lodging, plundering and destroying property. Pillaging was not confined to the unruly actions of soldiers, but was a feature of the rebel forces and its command: ‘The longer they stay’d the more insolent and outrageous they grew, demanding every Thing by Threats, drawn Swords, and Pistols clapp’d to the Breasts of many Persons, not only by the common Man, but their Officers’ (Derby Mercury, 13 December 1745). Reports such as these highlighted the brutality and danger posed by the rebels and justified surrender out of a fear of reprisal. Yet newspapers also sought to project confidence in the Hanoverian regime and its eventual victory. In this vein, anti-­Jacobitism in the London and provincial press fused with anti-­Scottish stereotypes to present the rebels as undisciplined and ill-­equipped. The Derby Mercury reflected this view, portraying the rebels as ill-­provisioned, boasting inflated numbers, and unable to drum up more than a handful of ragtag recruits. Far from constituting a regular army, those who tramped into Derby were ‘shabby, lusty, pitiful look’d Fellows, mix’d up with old Men and Boys; dress’d in dirty Plaids, and as dirty Shirts, without Breeches, and wore their Stockings made of Plaid, not much above half Way up their Legs, and some without Shoes’. A letter to the printer described the descent of the rebels on his house as ‘Fiends turn’d out of Hell, to ravage the Kingdom and cut Throats’. In spite of this ‘miserable situation’, however, the writer found the invaders comical and unintelligible, ‘jabbering, screaming, and howling together’ (Derby Mercury, 13 December 1745). Yet as the next issue sought to make clear, it was dangerous to underestimate the rebel forces, which included French as well as Highland troops. The rebels wrought destruction and devastation throughout Scotland, a letter from Angusshire explained, laying waste to vast swathes of the country including Edinburgh, Perth, Dundee and Strathmore. ‘Make these Things as publick as you please’, the letter urged, in the hopes that ‘the publishing of them may tend to stir up all sorts of Men to exert themselves to the utmost, in stopping this unjust and unhappy rebellion’ by the ‘Enemies of Mankind’ (Derby Mercury, 20 December 1745). Newspapers afforded arenas for public demonstrations of solidarity. The 15 October 1745 issue of the Dublin Journal, for example, announced the raising of Protestant troops in Londonderry, Dublin and Westmeath, and reported on celebrations, four days earlier, in

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newspapers and war 483 honour of the king’s coronation. Defence of the Hanoverian regime was linked to defence of the Protestant Church, and anti-­Catholicism was a central feature of anti-­Jacobitism. The twin anniversaries of the defeat of the Gunpowder Plot and the landing of William III in England on 5 November provided the opportunity for displays of loyalty. Bristol’s Country Advertiser dedicated over a column to the festivities, reportedly attended by thousands, in which the Pretender, the Pope and the devil were marched in effigy through the city before they were hoisted on the scaffold, fired upon by soldiers, and ultimately burned (Harris 1995b: 12–16). Condemnations of the rebellion and declarations of support for the regime were widely reprinted in newspapers and promoted a sense of subjects united in loyalty and purpose (Harris 1995a; 1995b). As Jacobite forces marched on Glasgow, for example, the 23 December issue of the Glasgow Courant filled its pages with denunciations of the rebels from numerous areas including Plymouth, Coventry, Stamford, Derby and Nottingham. The Jacobite defeat at the battle of Culloden in April 1746, which effectively ended the rising, prompted a great wave of expressions of loyalty. Dramatisations of the battle took place in London (General Advertiser, 8 May 1746). The London Gazette put out a special issue, eleven pages long, on 3 June. The first eight pages were devoted to expressions of joy from numerous locations, including the counties of Northumberland, Lanark, Aberdeen and Dumbarton, and the boroughs of Bridgewater, Dumbarton and Andover. Also included was a pledge of loyalty from the island of Barbados, written months before the conclusion of the rebellion but in this context serving to demonstrate the investment of the colonies in the Hanoverian regime. Combating the rebels involved the common cause of subjects, uniting across borders, and newspapers amplified their voices.

The American War of Independence and the Newspaper Press In the decades following the defeat of the Jacobite rebellion, newspapers and war grew in breadth and scope, intertwining the national, international, imperial and global. By the 1770s England had over 140 newspapers with tri-­weekly, bi-­weekly and daily formats. London alone had nineteen papers, of which nine were dailies with a circulation of about 40,000; the Public Advertiser by 1771 reached over 15 million subscribers annually. Subscription figures considerably underestimate readers, since newspapers in taverns and coffee houses could have twenty readers or more per paper (Barker 1998: 29–45; Bickham

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2002: 105; 2009: 22–3; Gardner 2016: 15–46; Harris 1987: 55–6). Edinburgh’s newspaper press had grown to more than ten, and Dublin’s to about fourteen. Scottish and Irish papers spread provincially as well (Brown 2012; Barnard 2006; Munter 1967: 85–8). Outlets for coverage of the American war were thus plentiful, and found ready audiences with the outbreak of hostilities in 1775. Newspapers during the American war included a rich variety of sources which went far beyond the traditional government accounts and reprints from London presses to encompass material from colonial newspapers, dispatches from American colonists and letters to the printer. Reports took readers through battles and sieges, explored landscapes across the Atlantic, and chronicled the involvement of indigenous Americans, slaves and German mercenaries (Bickham 2009: 206–32).The American colonies also sought to intervene in public discussion and debate over the war, hoping to elicit sympathy for their cause and influence its course. Congress, for example, dispatched material to London printers, including the April 1775 Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms and the address from The Twelve United Colonies to the Inhabitants of Great Britain. These reached print in the 29 May issue of the London Evening Post, and from there were reprinted in most newspapers. So great was the amount and variety of material that newspapers increased the use of subheadings to enable readers to follow the war more easily. The Hibernian Journal in Dublin, for example, broke down the larger heading ‘America’ with subheadings indicating origin and location, such as ‘In Congress’ or ‘Philadelphia’. The American war increasingly dominated multiple columns, and sometimes multiple pages; indeed, so popular was news of the war that it could even displace advertisements, which along with subscriptions constituted one of the two main sources of revenue. For the General Evening Post, the American war and its implications for the empire were of such great import that coverage was a public service: newspaper accounts would ‘furnish materials for the history of the most interesting disputes ever recorded in the annals of our country’ (General Evening Post, 1 January 1778). Similarly, another newspaper maintained that it brought material to the public ‘that ought to be universally known’ (Public Advertiser, 17 June 1778). Most newspapers broadly approved of the war and the suppression of the American rebellion. Unlike the Jacobite rebellion, however, that did not mean unqualified expressions of loyalty to the government, and many papers were critical of the conduct of the war and its leadership (Bickham 2009; Barker 1998: 147–70; Bradley 1986: 91–100). Even

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Figure 20.1  Title page of Common Sense by Thomas Paine, 1776 (Creative Commons Licence, courtesy of Wikimedia)

papers closely tied to the king and his ministry, including the Morning Post and the Morning Herald, questioned government management of the war (Bickham 2002: 107). Moreover, newspapers regularly contained discussion and debate on the merits of colonial grievances. In addition to lively letters to the printer both defending the subjugation of the rebellion and upholding the legitimacy of colonial grievances, for example, in the spring and summer of 1776 the Caledonian Mercury printed extracts from Thomas Paine’s Common Sense justifying independence (see Figure 20.1). Yet newspapers above all were commercial publications and avoided stalwart partisanship. By the 1770s newspapers depended upon subscribers and advertisers for revenue; as such, printers and publishers sought to broaden rather than restrict audiences and were reluctant to alienate readers or lose them to competitors (Barker 1998: 29–45). Sympathy for the American cause largely collapsed with the Declaration of Independence, the news of which arrived in London in August 1776 (Bickham 2002: 119). The London Gazette was the first outlet to publish the news, which was buried near the end of two

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letters from General Howe, dated 7 and 8 July: ‘I am informed that the Continental Congress have declared the United Colonies free and independent States’ (London Gazette, 10 August 1776). The next issue of the Gazette contained no follow-­up. The text of the Declaration was put to print nearly a week later, in the 16 August issues of the Public Advertiser and Lloyd’s Evening Post. The next day, on 17 August, it appeared in the London Evening Post. It reached Edinburgh on 20 August in the Caledonian Mercury, which printed the text on the last column of the first page, after the issue’s latest instalment of the history of unrest in the American colonies; these were excerpts reprinted from London’s Annual Register, later printed in 1780 as An Impartial History of the War in America, Between Great Britain and Her Colonies, From Its Commencement to the end of the Year 1779. On 21 August it appeared in the Edinburgh Evening Courant and Kentish Gazette, reaching Dublin on 23 August in the Hibernian Journal and Saunders’s News-Letter. A number of newspapers made editorial changes to the Declaration in their printings, altering or omitting portions that referred to the king or to alleged royal abuses. For example, the 19 August printing of the Northampton Mercury replaced ‘King of Great Britain’ with ‘K— of Great Britain’. This practice allowed the reader to deduce the intended meaning but shielded the person and office from public identification and accusation. Other papers, including the 16 August issue of Lloyd’s Evening Post, one of the first two printings of the Declaration, took this a step farther and omitted even the initial ‘K’, printing simply the ‘— of Great Britain’. This version of the Declaration also omitted ‘Tyranny’, replacing the word with ‘T—’. Evidently these alterations remained too transparent and accusatory for the 19 August issue of the Hampshire Chronicle, which changed the text entirely from the ‘King of Great Britain’ to ‘the present rulers’. The Hampshire Chronicle also omitted the colonists’ list of oppressions, all of which begin with the word ‘He’. Even this went too far for the Stamford Mercury, which published the Declaration on 22 August. Printed on the last of four pages, down the third of four columns following advertisements for venereal disease drops, the Stamford Mercury altered ‘the History of the Present King of Great Britain’ to ‘the present History of Great Britain’. Equally significantly, though the paper included the colonists’ list of oppressions, it replaced ‘He’ with ‘It’, thereby not only removing the king from the text of the Declaration, but divorcing him from any association with the colonists’ grievances. Some newspapers sought to cleave the king from involvement and responsibility for the crisis in other ways. The London Evening Post,

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newspapers and war 487 for example, was generally supportive of the war and feared that the break-­up of the empire would advantage Britain’s enemies, especially France. Yet it also faulted the North ministry for mismanagement of the crisis. An editorial in the November 1776 issue urged the king to place responsibility firmly with the ministry, and confess to the House of Lords with the following words: ‘I am now sensible of the errors into which I have been led by evil counsellors.’ The king, the editorial continued, should offer to the colonists the opportunity for reconciliation: ‘The Americans would then be unpardonable, if they refused to accept terms which insured their freedom – and if they did refuse such terms, every English heart would unite against them’ (London Evening Post, 7 November 1776). Some papers condemned the management of particular battles or specific military leaders. ‘Our empire is split asunder’, declared the Norfolk Chronicle 1776, as a result of ‘this unnatural war’. The paper went on to criticise the crushing defeat of the British forces at the battle of Sullivan’s Island in South Carolina. The Americans were outnumbered by 252 guns to their 19, and Fort Sullivan was ‘insignificant’. Yet the British were defeated, with 64 men killed and 142 wounded, and were forced to acknowledge that ‘a further attempt would have been the destruction of many brave men, without the least probability of success’ (Norfolk Chronicle, 7 September 1776). Other newspapers, such as the 29 August 1778 issue of the Public Advertiser, contrasted British commanders unfavourably with George Washington. Where Washington prohibited his troops from plundering, Gage’s troops engaged in destruction (Bickham 2002: 112–13). In addition to the political, imperial and military dimensions of the American war, newspapers also served as forums for discussion and debate about its financial implications for tax and trade. By November 1776, according to the London Evening Post, this ‘unnatural war’ had cost an estimated £4 million and 90 ships (London Evening Post, 7 November 1776). Many advertisements were also tied to the war. In particular, newspapers advertised auctions of cargo seized from enemy ships and notice of musters, which often took place in coffee ­houses – ­themselves dynamic spaces for the circulation of verbal, written and printed news (Brinkman-­Schwartz 2021; Cowan 2005). Reports of the progress of the war also had financial consequences. Geographical distance meant it could take weeks for confirmation of reports to cross the Atlantic, and the circulation of rumour and gossip could make readers wary of the authenticity of accounts. As a result, there could be suspicion that news of the American war was invented in London as a way to manipulate readers and influence stock prices. Indeed, by

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the 1770s speculation and gambling on news were lucrative pastimes. Readers compared details and dates across news sources to try to track the movement of troops and estimate casualty figures. Sometimes accounts of battle could have an impact on government securities. The report on the battle of Long Island in the 10 October 1776 issue of the London Gazette, for example, led speculators to bet on an ensuing conquest of New York, which in turn caused stock prices to rise (Slauter 2009: 767–71). As the war progressed, newspapers reverberated with the humiliation of defeat and lamented the break-­up of the empire. An address to General Howe in the Caledonian Mercury, for example, condemned ‘The loss of America, the ruin of your country’s greatness, an indelible disgrace fixed upon the honour of its arms, the lives of many brave men sacrificed to no purpose’ (Caledonian Mercury, 30 December 1778). In its 6 January 1778 issue, the Morning Post lamented that ‘the History of our American Campaigns must excite Laughter whenever it shall be published’ (Morning Post, 6 January 1778). The sting of accumulated losses had drained interest by the conclusion of the war in 1783. Only two issues received broad coverage: the treaty of peace and Washington’s farewell address to the army, which was printed in full in many newspapers, including the 27 December 1783 issue of the London Chronicle (Bickham 2002: 120–1).

Conclusion The history of newspapers is intertwined with the history of war. In the early 1640s newsbooks emerged to provide information on the progress of the Civil War and served as instruments of discussion, interpretation and debate. The demand for news spurred the creation of titles in subsequent wars as well, including the Glorious Revolution and the 1745 Jacobite rebellion. The circumstances of war, such as postal interruption, geographical distance, invasion and military occupation, influenced the circulation, availability and presentation of news. The form and availability of war news was also affected by the enforcement or relaxation of censorship. The republican governments sought to manage the transmission of news, and its content, by minimising royalist and other potentially critical newspapers, and maximising the spread of news favourable to the Commonwealth and Protectorate regimes, which included harnessing local presses during the conquests of Ireland and Scotland. Censorship was never absolute, however, and news circulated in other ways, including letters, verbal conversation and topical pamphlets. The Restoration brought the

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case study 17 : mercurius politicus 489 renewal of pre-­publication licensing, which sought to channel news through an official newspaper, the London Gazette. Unlike Politicus, the London Gazette was not a vehicle for polemic and debate, which made it ill-­equipped to respond to political and military crisis, as in 1688–89. Pre-­publication licensing ended in 1695 and the market for newspapers increased in the eighteenth century, which saw significant growth in the number of titles and expansion into the provinces and colonies. Eighteenth-­century newspapers increasingly adopted political slants, which could be critical of government actions and interests. During the 1745 Jacobite rebellion, however, newspapers generally condemned the rising, and by printing (and reprinting) displays of support for the Hanoverian cause, sought to demonstrate the unity of subjects across borders in opposition to the rebels. Some papers started to adopt new methods of organisation, including headlines and subheadings, to make invasion and conflict easier to follow. The American war also saw widespread newspaper support for the suppression of colonial revolt. Yet papers were willing to condemn political and military leaders for their actions and conduct. Some of this criticism was born of concerns about taxation and the impact of the war on trade, while other complaints stemmed from the desire to keep the empire intact. Dependence on subscriptions and advertisements, rather than government sponsorship as in the previous century, involved appealing to a broad audience. For commercial publications, war coverage was particularly well suited to generate and maintain interest. Newspapers involved readers in the unfolding of war, its triumphs and defeats. As they crossed oceans and borders, and wove through newspaper issues, accounts could preserve a sense of immediacy, even urgency, that even today can transcend time and distance.

Case Study 17: Mercurius Politicus and the Jamaica Invasion, 1655 Nicole Greenspan The 4 January 1655 issue of Marchamont Nedham’s Mercurius Politicus ended with the following short notice: ‘The Fleet being all gone from Portsmouth with Gen. Venables and Gen. Pen; they have had a very fair wind since, so that those ships which first set sail, are conceived to be far on their voyage. God Prosper them.’ Here, with little flourish, Politicus alerted readers to the launch of the Western Design. This announcement followed from the preceding issue of 28 December which briefly reported, also on the last page, the departure of

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Figure 20.2  John Thurloe (1616–68), engraving by Jacobus Houbraken, c. 1738, after Samuel Cooper (Courtesy of Wellcome Collection, Public Domain Mark) part of the fleet, and marked the culmination of preparations for the unnamed expedition mentioned at the conclusion of previous December issues. The Protectorate did not publicly reveal the objective of the Western Design so as not to tip off the Spanish government, and even participants, such as the seaman Henry Whistler, were not informed (BL Sloane MS 3926 f. 3). Nedham had access to government papers through John Thurloe, from 1653 the head of intelligence under the Protectorate (Raymond 1998a; Peacey 2006a: 196–7). Nedham’s reports in Politicus allow us to chart the circulation of information and the attempt to spin it in ways favourable to the Protectorate government. Periodic updates in the spring of 1655 placed the fleet at Barbados, though reports on the Design did not arrive until after the loss at Hispaniola and the 10 May capture of Jamaica. On 28 June Politicus carried the dramatic, if erroneous, news from St Christopher’s that 1,000 men from the fleet had taken Santo Domingo. One month later, the 26 July issue of Politicus reported that the forces landed at Hispaniola but were ambushed and suffered some casualties.

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case study 17 : mercurius politicus 491 As the troops then regrouped, ‘more of our forces coming on, the enemy durst not stand to it, but fled’. The next issue, on 2 August, contained more detail. Politicus reported that the commanders landed 8,000 men approximately 20 miles from Santo Domingo. En route to the town an advance party fell to an ambush comprised of ‘Spaniards and Negroes’. Ultimately the troops were able to repel the enemy ‘and killed many in the pursuit’. Politicus advised readers that these accounts awaited confirmation and did not come from the commanders; those reports at last appeared in the 9 August issue. Politicus announced, ‘our Generals have relinquished Hispaniola, were landed at Jamaica, and become Masters of the Island’. Nedham provided a series of descriptions of Jamaica, from such authorities as Columbus and Peter Heylyn, attesting to its significance in the West Indies, before publishing longer accounts of the Jamaica conquest. In this manner, Politicus crafted a narrative of conquest that minimised the Hispaniola defeat and magnified the capture of the Jamaica colony (Politicus, 9 August 1655). Reports in Politicus described Jamaica as rich in resources and strategically beneficial, much more so than Hispaniola. Readers were presented with the image of a colony bustling with activity, building settlements, planting and raising defences (Politicus, 6 August 1655). This was a far cry from the high mortality, illness and demoralisation that filled the reports of successive commanders. Politicus printed edited and redacted versions of these reports to play down hardship and promote the new colony. Venables’s 13 June letter to Thurloe appeared markedly different as published in Politicus. The original letter depicted a settlement plagued by death and disease, and on the brink of starvation. Much of the responsibility lay with the soldiers who were unwilling to plant, though Venables also blamed the government for not providing ‘what was promised’ in supply (Birch 1742, III: 545–7). Politicus printed a shortened version of the report, removing criticism of the Protectorate and references to starvation, and supplemented it with a long, glossy advertisement of the benefits and value of Jamaica, which was widely reprinted in other newsbooks and pamphlets (Politicus, 6 September 1655). Nedham used his newsbook monopoly from October 1655 to promote the Jamaica settlement and war against Spain. He continued his practice of redacting reports, playing down ongoing illness, high mortality and low morale. For example, in November 1655 Robert Sedgwick, the new commander at Jamaica, composed a long, detailed account of his arrival at Jamaica and the condition of the island. He made three copies, sent by different routes, to ensure that at least one of them reached the Protector safely. It was a gloomy report filled with shock and dismay, which he advised should not be made public so as not to boost enemy spirits. ‘The truth is’, Sedgwick confessed, ‘I saw nothing but symptoms of necessity and desolation.’ Hundreds of soldiers perished each month, along with the previous commander of the army, Major

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General Fortescue, and he was appalled to find many bodies unburied, while ‘many of them, that were alive, walked like ghosts or dead men’. His fleet brought additional troops, ‘lusty, healthful, gallant men’, to supplement the existing forces; of the 831 in one regiment who went ashore, fifty already had died, including five officers. Soldiers remained unwilling to plant, and provisions were left exposed to the elements and to theft. Nevertheless, Sedgwick confirmed that Jamaica was strategically valuable and rich in resources, and he was committed to securing and building the settlement. He promptly set about developing a council of the army, constructing a storehouse and unloading supplies from the four merchant ships in his fleet that brought almost 1,000 tons of provisions (Birch 1742, IV: 151–5). As it appeared in Politicus, Sedgwick’s report was condensed into a handful of short paragraphs, the majority of which described the journey to Jamaica. Sedgwick’s description of the colony was almost entirely unrecognisable: ‘some sickness hath been among them in the Island, yet no otherwise than among the Natives themselves in those parts’. While acknowledging the death of Fortescue ‘and some others’, the account went on to emphasise that the troops were ‘very much encouraged upon the supplies’ brought by the fleet. Another report later in the issue, dated October, was more forthcoming about the state of the island: ‘We have lost many of our Soldiery by Sickness, and some of our Officers.’ Yet Sedgwick’s report carried a later date, in November, and readers would have had reason to infer that health had improved in the interim (Politicus, 7 February 1656). The portrayal of Jamaica in Politicus was strategically smart and would probably have received Sedgwick’s approval. Conceding setbacks and hardship while suggesting that conditions were improving sought to transform Jamaica from a weak, ill-­defended settlement vulnerable to Spanish attack to a less attractive target for reconquest, one requiring much greater preparation and investment with uncertain chances of success. The coverage of Jamaica in Politicus thus employed a complex and multilayered strategy of alteration, editing and spin, built upon censorship and monopoly, to play down defeat and hardship and promote the expansion of empire.

Chapter Twenty-­one

CRIME AND TRIAL REPORTING Elisabetta Cecconi

Introduction The seventeenth- and eighteenth-­century press abounded with stories of crime and justice which, due to their strong social impact and commercial value, have received ample attention in different disciplines, from press, social and legal historiography to historical pragmatics and news discourse analysis. Both historians and linguists have agreed on the key role played by the print medium in informing and constructing people’s knowledge about law and order in a historical period characterised by the unprecedented circulation of crime news. Indeed, the appearance of the early newsbooks of the 1640s, their coexistence with previous forms of cheap print, and the evolution of print news throughout the eighteenth century along with the development of specialised crime literature offered a fertile and variegated soil for the shaping of public perceptions of crime ­and – ­most ­importantly – ­for the construction of people’s (dis)trust of the judicial system. In order to trace the evolution of crime and trial reporting over 160 years, I will refer to the concepts of religion and law. As Sharpe points out (1999: 215), in a society overwhelmed by fear of apocalyptic disorder and, from the early eighteenth century, increasingly concerned about crime and the defence of property, religion and law operated in tandem in the battle against delinquency. If seventeenth-­century crime and trial reports maintained a profitable ideological interlacement between Christian morality and legal practice, in the eighteenth century religion progressively withdrew and more technical aspects of the forensic procedure came to the forefront as guarantors of the justice and equity of the law. This very gradual process of secularisation was consistent with a corresponding change in the perception of crime itself, from mortal sin 493

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instigated by the devil to a social problem related to increasing poverty and unemployment. In this chapter, I shall examine both crime and trial reports, focusing on the way in which the encoding of information contributed to forging early forms of moral panic among people with little or no direct experience of crime. While crime reports privilege a chronological narrative of the deed where minimal concessions to the trial examination are functional to the author’s discrediting of the criminal’s defence, trial reports are characterised by a closer adherence to the interactive structure of the legal proceedings with a higher communicative distance between author and reader. Examples of the two types of narrative will be taken from two electronic ­corpora – ­the Lancaster Newsbooks Corpus (LNC), containing all the newsbooks present in the Thomason Tracts from December 1653 to May 1654, and the Zurich English Newspaper Corpus (ZEN) consisting of 349 complete English newspapers selected in ten-­year intervals from 1661 to 1791 – and from two electronic archives: Early English Books Online and the British Newspaper Archive. The case study will be devoted to the press coverage of the murder of the Archbishop of St Andrews (1679) and attention will be paid to the construction and flow of (mis)information from Scotland to London and back to the rest of the kingdom for propaganda purposes.

Seventeenth-­century Crime Literature: Occasional Pamphlets Each society at different points in time establishes what is criminal by setting the boundaries of what is licit and acceptable (Ward 2014: 5; Sharpe 1999: 5–6). In the seventeenth century the notion of illegality was strongly interwoven with that of immorality, and religion played a key role in assessing criminal behaviour within the local community. At least until the end of the century contemporaries did not conceive of crime as distinct from sin, and law-­breakers were primarily represented as sinners (Gray 2016). Many historians (Lake 1994a; 1994b; Clark 2002; 2003; Gaskill 1998; Walsham 1999; Watt 1991; Raymond 2003) insist on the providential pattern of seventeenth-­century crime literature. In a society that was imbued with principles of obedience, order and stability, the most persuasive form of Christian indoctrination passed through the representation of moral transgression in the shape of serious crimes, namely murder and property offences (theft, burglary, robbery). In the period from 1640 to 1670 murder was framed as the highest manifestation of social disorder, and its coverage

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crime and trial reporting 495 in occasional and weekly pamphlets became the most convincing way to acquaint the masses with the effectiveness of both legal and divine justice through the inexorability and fairness of punishment. In his pioneering study of seventeenth-­ century murder pamphlets, Lake defines the genre as being characterised by an overlap of the moral, theological and narratological universes, where titillation elicited by gory and macabre descriptions of corpses in various stages of mutilation and decay combines with admonition traceable in the representation of an inverted social order and with the moralising actualised in the providential apprehension and punishment of the murderer. Drawing on Lake, Clark (2002) focused on the abundance of accounts of domestic murders committed by wives and mothers, thus providing a deeper insight into the sociocultural tendency of the time to project on to women the most sinful aspects of human nature. These cultural prejudices towards female criminality pervaded the whole of Britain as documented by the studies conducted by Kilday in Scotland (2016; 2019) and Kelly (1992) in Ireland. In Murther, Murther, or A bloody Relation (1641) (Figure 21.1) we find an interesting sample of the way in which female domestic homicide was advertised in the summary section of an early modern English pamphlet. Features of journalistic factuality are combined with overt and covert references to Christian teaching. The overt reference is traceable in the readaption of a biblical verse from Ephesians (5: 22–3: Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the Church), while the covert reference is conveyed by the structuring of the information in terms of deed–participants–apprehension. The encoding of the apprehension in a separate paragraph draws the reader’s attention to the efficacy of the judicial system and, at an implicit level, to divine providence as a precondition for the discovery of the murder. Prominence is given to the role played by the devil in the guise of another woman who acts as instigator of the deed. This is a common trope in crime pamphlets which is consistent with the medieval Christian belief that offenders were possessed by demons rather than acting on their own free will (Gray 2016). A typical component of news pamphlets until the 1650s is the representational woodcut on the title page. The visual aid had a clear commercial purpose in that it mirrored the text content of the summary, thus facilitating access to the commodity. The strongly personalised style of the author emerges in the opening paragraph addressed to the ‘Gentle Reader’, where the writer indulges in homiletic reflections over the natural, God-­deriving love of wives towards their husbands and guides female readers to interpret the story as a moral lesson.

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Figure 21.1  Title page of the news pamphlet Murther, Murther, 1641 (© British Library Board, Anonymous [2], 6 p. 1641, Thomason Collection, British Library, Early English Books, 1641–1700 (Wing), 255:E.172[7],Wing/M3084)

Gentle Reader, [. . .] Harken to me you that be wives, and give attendance you which as yet are unmarried, regard the words of Saint Paul which commands that every wife should love her own husband as Christ the church . . . (Murther, Murther, 1641) While Lake focuses his attention on the Puritan appropriation of crime news, Peacey (2004b) accounts for the political exploitation of murder pamphlets to recount the outbreak of the Irish Rebellion to the English public. A bulk of ‘atrocity pamphlets’ inundated the London market in 1641–42 denouncing the bloody massacres committed by Catholic Irish on Protestant English families. A similar political appropriation of murder news occurred in the turbulent years of the Popish Plot and, in particular, on the occasion of the rebellion of the Scottish Covenanters in 1679, as will be shown in the case study. In order to enhance the authenticity and credibility of the politically biased account, crime

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crime and trial reporting 497 reporting was often structured in the form of a (more or less fictitious) private letter, which shows the hybrid nature of the pamphlet genre (Brownlees 2011: 82). The example below is taken from the title page of the pamphlet The Rebels Turkish Tyranny. THE REBELS TURKISH TYRANNY in their march Decem. 24. 1641. As it was taken out of a Letter sent from Mr. Witcome a Merchant in Kingsale to a Brother of his here. Shewing how cruelly they put them to the Sword, ravished religious women, and put their Children upon red hot Spits before their parents eyes; throw them in the fire, and burn them to ashes; cut off their eares, and nose, put out their eyes; cut off their armes, and legges, broyle them at the fire, cut out their tongues, and thrust hot Irons down their throats, drown them; dash out their brains, and such like other cruelty not heard of amongst Christians. (The Rebels Turkish Tyranny, 1641)

Crime Reporting in the Early Newsbooks Although occasional pamphlets continued to be a profitable product of entertainment and edification through more or less fictionalised accounts of criminals, from the 1650s newsbooks too exhibited a steady presence of criminal and court reporting in their account of foreign and home news. The newsbooks, or weekly pamphlets, which circulated in the first years of the Interregnum, had all to be approved by the government, and from 1655 they had to be directly written on its behalf (Brownlees 2012: 11). The structuring of the news varied considerably depending on the multiplicity and heterogeneity of the available newsbooks (Raymond 2011: 393). Some periodicals advertised crime events in their lead as part of the most remarkable home news of the week: the author frames the crime event through a non-­chronological order which appears to anticipate the top-­down structuring principle of modern journalism (Ungerer 2002; Jucker 2005; Cecconi 2009; 2020). The structure envisages that what is constructed as being most important in the story is told at the very beginning, whereas circumstantial details of the event and its causes are given afterwards. The Grand Politique POST; Faithfully communicating, The Speech and Confession of Mr James Harrington on Monday last, at the place of Execution, over against the Grayhound Tavern, at the lower end of Fleetstreet, with the Cause and manner of his

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Figure 21.2  Front page of the newsbook The Grand Politique Post, 21–28 February 1654 (© British Library Board, Thomason Tracts. 39: E.225[14])

Death, and his Declaration and Narrative to the People touching the Meal mans wife of Brainford, and the whole Particulars of the Business. (The Grand Politique Post, 21–28 February 1654) The foregrounding of the penitent sinner confessing his/her crime was a common structuring device in early modern crime narratives, which responded to the government’s need to sanction the fairness of the judicial procedure as executor of divine justice. Not all newsbooks gave equal weight to the same news. Harrington’s execution for the robbery and murder of M. Hancock, for example, was not anticipated in the summary sections of other London newsbooks (A Perfect Account, Faithful Scout, The Moderate Intelligencer), which nonetheless reported the fact in the body of the text by adopting the ‘institutionalised retrospection’ strategy that echoes the sequence of events in court proceedings, where the indictment opens the case and is followed by retrospective accounts of the crime or the criminal’s life (Jucker 2005). The Moderate Intelligencer, the Weekly Post and the

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crime and trial reporting 499 Faithful Scout reported exactly the same account, according to a text reuse practice that was common at the time, especially among newsbooks published by the same printer (Hardie et al. 2010). The narrative follows a punishment–deed–social actors–causes pattern which, in its last section (causes), replicates the reality paradigm of the devilish woman acting as instigator of the crime accompanied by authorial value judgements. The 27 of February last proved a fatal day to many; for, beside the Woman that burnt her child, 8 or more having received Sentence of death were executed; amongst the rest, four of them were hanged at the lower end of Fleetstreet, over against the Dog Tavern where they committed the Fact having not only robbed M. Hancock (Master of the said house, of great store of Plate; but likewise cut and wounded him in several places; for which, Mr James Harrington (a Bailey of Middlesex) and the Mealmans wife of Brainford, who served the said Mr Hancock with meal, and knew the Orders of the house, and where the Plate lay, suffered the bitter pangs of death; a just reward for the Woman, but a pitiful Object to behold the man: for she was not only the grand Setter, and chief contriver of the Design, in drawing in of poor Mr Harrington: but likewise the only betrayer and Decoy of her Noble Hectors, who she so termed . . . (The Faithful Scout, 3 March 1654)

Crime and Trial Reporting in The London Gazette Following the Restoration, reports on crime and punishment were a steady presence in the London Gazette as well as in other metropolitan newspapers of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The news was not only placed in the dispatches but in advertisements and announcements too. These latter had a bipartite structure, basically consisting of a description of the crime and the reward promised (Fries 2009: 16): Robb’d the 10th of Nov. last, from Mr. Joseph Butlock of B ­ ristol . . . ­one Silver Watch and Case, there being on the backside of the Case an Almanack, a Hanger with a Plate Hilt, a Buff Belt with Silver Buckles; by three men, the one a middle-­siz’d Man, full-­ Fac’d, a short White Wigg much Curled, in an old Cloth-­colour riding Coat, on a flea-­bitten Horse, about 14 Hands high, his Brows Brown; the other a middle-­siz’d Black Favour’d, on a Grey Horse, above 14 hands high, with Black Hair or Wigg, and thin

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Favour; the other a full sett Man, thin Favour’d, with curled dark Brown Hair. Whoever can discover the Persons aforesaid, to Mr. Butlock of Bristol, or at the Three Cups in Breadstree, London; (the said Robbers having killed one John Thomas, the said Mr. Butlock’s Servant,) shall have their Charges, and ten pounds reward. (London Gazette, 28 November–1 December 1681) The fact-­centred and impersonal style of the narrative also characterises the more proper crime accounts in similar newspapers: From Chelmsford in Essex, we have an account of two Highway-­ men being brought to the Gaol, who were taken on Monday last Robbing a Gentleman on Newmarket-­Heath, one of them is said to be of the company of those who committed the great Robbery on a Gentlemans house near that place, for which the Life-­Guard-­ men were committed. (The Domestick Intelligence, 20 May 1681) By the end of the century, the realm of facts, rationality and law progressively takes over, while religion and superstition withdraw without ever completely disappearing, especially in popular crime literature. As Sharpe claims, the end of the seventeenth century marks a phase of transition in which crime moved away from its conceptualisation as sin to be framed as a social problem for which solutions could be proposed: ‘­law . . . ­was coming to replace religion as the main ideological cement which held society together’ (Sharpe 1999: 18). Regarding real trial reports, these are not attested before the eighteenth century in the ZEN corpus. Fries reports thirty-­four occurrences of the phrase ‘tried at’ in the corpus, thirteen of which refer to trials at the Old Bailey, and they all appear from 1751 onwards. In seventeenth-­century Scotland and Ireland, crime news reporting was almost non-­existent given the lower commercial interest in crime stories. In Scotland, Kilday (2016) claims that because of the very strict religious climate, specific stories of criminals were seemingly largely ignored by news writers, and apart from a few general comments on the ‘unnatural’ nature of some crimes, the actual individuals involved remained almost ‘unmentionable’. According to Aldis’s List of Books published in Scotland before 1700, Robert Stempill’s Deploration of the cruell murther of James Earl of Moray (1570) was the only murder pamphlet published until 1679, when a narrative of the murder of the Archbishop of St Andrews was published in Edinburgh (see case study). A change in attitude occurred towards the end of the century when Scottish printers and publishers began to acknowledge the profitable income to be derived from crime news (Kilday 2016; Brock

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crime and trial reporting 501 2016). Trial pamphlets such as The tryal of Philip Standsfield, son to Sir James Standsfield, of New-Milns; for the murder of his father, and other crimes libel’d against him (1688) coexisted with sensational crime news coming from London and reprinted in Edinburgh (for example, An Account of a most horrid and barbarous murther and robbery committed on the body of Captain Brown . . . with the most strange, wonderful and miraculous discovery of the same on Tuesday the 22d. of March 1694). In Ireland, Ohlmeyer (2011: 49) laments the relative absence of a corpus of locally printed papers which could allow researchers to investigate early modern Irish print culture. In EEBO the only example of crime reportage in early modern Ireland is a letter pamphlet printed in Dublin in 1700 and entitled An Account of a most Inhumane And Barbarous MURDER Committed by one William Sherloge and his Whore, Upon the Bodies of his own Wife & Child; And how he sett his House on Fire, Was Apprehended, and Carried before Captain Evans, Examined and Committed to Cork-Gaol. By and large, the crime literature circulating in early modern Ireland appears to have been imported from London (Gillespie 2005: 78; Raymond 2011: 391).

The Golden Age of Writing about Crime: Eighteenth‑century Newspapers Ward defines the eighteenth century as ‘the golden age of writing about crime’. Indeed, in the first half of the century propertied Londoners read a greater variety of printed material about crime and justice than at any time before or after (Ward 2014: 26). The older crime genres, namely pamphlets, broadside ballads and increasingly newspapers, were joined by two specialised periodical publications: the Old Bailey Proceedings and the Ordinary’s Account of executed offenders. The two publications, which appeared in 1674 and 1676 respectively, gained momentum in the course of the eighteenth century, when in particular the Old Bailey Proceedings underwent several structural and content changes which transformed them from providentially marked diegetic summaries into allegedly authentic verbatim transcripts of whatever was said during the courtroom procedure. As a result, the eighteenth-­ century newspaper crime accounts distinguish themselves by a new focus on law and trial procedure, according to a sociocultural process defined as ‘lawyerisation of criminal trials’ (Lemmings 2016) which continued into the nineteenth century (Claridge 2021). This process started in tandem with the emergence of prosecution and defence lawyers in the 1720s and 1730s (Beattie 1991: 221) and peaked by the end

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of the century when Deveraux (2007) registers an increased reporting of the Old Bailey Proceedings in metropolitan newspapers. In his analysis of newspaper coverage of criminal trials in the early eighteenth century, Lemmings identifies two main types of trial accounts: 1) brief summary reports of the Session house in the Old Bailey which appear regularly and are a staple of English newspapers, and 2) occasional extended reporting of selected sensational trials for cases of extreme violence. For most of the century newspaper editors were largely dependent on the Old Bailey Proceedings for their own shorter accounts throughout the whole of Great Britain. Provincial newspapers replicated crime and trial news taken from London newspapers and newsletters. Snell’s illuminating study on crime reporting in the Kentish Post (2007) shows that 98 per cent of the total crime content came from the London press and that in the period between 1729 and 1753 crime reports consistently accounted for some 20–30 per cent of the total reporting in the provincial newspaper. This is indicative of the increasing interest in issues of law and order among the middle and upper classes to which newspapers were primarily addressed, as well as a rising governmental preoccupation with crime as a social pathology of the time. The following report in the Ipswich Journal, based on an Old Bailey trial, is characteristic of much metropolitan and non-­metropolitan crime reporting: Last Night the Sessions ended at the Old Bailey, when 4 Persons received Sentence of Death; viz. William Miller for a Robbery on the Highway; Edward Rowland for Horse stealing; Jane Cromney, for privately stealing a Guinea, and 17 Shillings; and Grace Baldwin for Shoplifting. Joseph Harrison, convicted of wilful and corrupt Perjury, was sentenced to stand on the Pillory, to suffer six Months Imprisonment, and fin’d 20 Marks. James Williams, committed for attempting to commit Sodomy with Henry Lloyd, one of the Children of the King’s Chapel, was sentenced to stand on the Pillory at Charing Cross; and is to be transported, being likewise convicted of a single Felony. John Brown, a Coachman brought by Habeas Corpus from New Serum, standing Indicted for wilful and corrupt Perjury, was try’d for the same, which Trial lasted several Hours, but in the conclusion he was acquitted. (Ipswich Journal, 10 December 1726) The Old Bailey derived account reveals a sober style and a serious attitude towards crime that is consistent with a progressive decline in the sensational bloody news of popular origin by the mid-­eighteenth

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crime and trial reporting 503 century. The narrative follows the top-­ down structuring principle which had already been used in the popular crime literature of the seventeenth century, and proceeds from the outcome of the trial to the offence committed. The offences are itemised in order of gravity, from capital offences to minor crimes punished with transportation, branding or whipping. Most of the accounts tend to be formulaic: they begin with a time reference to the conclusion of the Sessions at the Old Bailey, followed by the number of people who received capital punishment, their name and the offence committed. The remaining part of the account is devoted to non-­capital offences with a traditional focus on the description of the punishment. As Lemmings (2016) notices, there was no detailed recounting of any of these trials other than their conclusions, since at the time it was relatively uncommon for newspapers to provide much more information. Similar findings were reported by Snell (2007) with regard to the Kentish Post, where condensed crime narratives, focused on the action or the outcome of the trial, left very little or no space for the explanatory rhetoric typical of seventeenth-­century pamphlets. Besides murder, property offences were the favourite topic of newspaper editors since their propertied middle- and upper-­class consumers were much more interested in stories in which they were likely to be involved as potential victims. The above passage from the Ipswich Journal illustrates the priority ascribed to property crimes as well as a more variegated and comprehensive depiction of crime (Snell 2007). Indeed, the report touches on a case of perjury and sodomy which, along with the inclusion of misdemeanour in eighteenth-­ century newspapers, breaks the dominance of murder and highway robbery reportage. If on the one hand, this over-­coverage of crime in the press prompted social anxiety about a perceived exponential rise in social disorder, on the other hand, it constructed a reassuringly positive image of the efficacy of public justice. In his study of the representation of justice in the eighteenth century, Shoemaker claims that the ideological message of the Old Bailey Proceedings and newspaper trial accounts was that ‘crime was a significant problem but the courts did their best, while ensuring trials were conducted fairly, to punish the guilty’ (2008: 573). The importance of conveying the fairness and judicious discernment of the court explains the reason why cases of a­ cquittal – ­although less interesting and newsworthy than ­conviction – ­are regularly touched on in newspapers. In the Ipswich Journal report, the acquittal is introduced by reference to the long duration of the trial: a circumstantial detail which is indicative of the conscientious actions of the judge

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and jury. The very predominance of solved offences in metropolitan and provincial newspapers was meant to enhance the success of the justice system (Ward 2014) along with implicit or explicit comments on the justice of the verdict (King 2007). This government-­friendly approach to the recounting of trials might have had something to do with forms of state control over a topic that played such a key role in shaping public perception of justice administration and good government. Moreover, as King (2007: 99) points out, judges were able to ensure that news writers and editors provided a press coverage which stressed the fairness, mercy and high quality of the justice, although what impact this authority-­mediated reportage might have had on people’s attitudes to the law and the legitimacy of the courts remains unclear. The insatiable appetite for crime stories was such that both metropolitan and provincial newspapers (Rogers 1992; Snell 2007; Fries 2009) also reported offences that were unsolved or unpunished. According to King (2007: 92), unsolved offences represented about a quarter of core crime and justice stories in the late eighteenth century, and most of them covered violence to people or property, with over half focusing specifically on highway robbery. The possibility that offenders were at large and might never be apprehended increased people’s anxiety about urban surveillance, as is evident from the news writer’s comments in the following crime report taken from the ZEN corpus: Last Saturday about Twelve at Noon as Mary Hewit an honest Industrious Woman who sells Butter, Eggs, &c. at Highgate and the Adjacent Villages, was returning from Leadenhall Market, was attacked by three Ruffians at the Bottom of Highgate Hill, who knocked her down and threw her into a Ditch. On her screaming out, a Man came to her Assistance which prevented their robbing her; but they beat the poor Woman so violently about the Head, that she now lies dangerously ill, and has almost lost her Sight. How scandalous it is that Robberies should be thus committed in the Face of the Sun and in high Roads? How dreadful must be the Consequence of these Enormities as Winter is drawing on if not timely prevented? (London Morning Penny Post, 9 September 1751) As in England, crime reportage in eighteenth-­century Scotland and Ireland combined local crime news with an abundance of recycled material from the London press. The Edinburgh-­based Caledonian Mercury (1720–1867), one of the most complete newspaper sources

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crime and trial reporting 505 for crime coverage, faithfully reported proceedings from court papers of the High Court of Justiciary in Scotland together with occasional instances of petty and serious crimes coming from within the country and from London. In their study on eighteenth-­century murder reporting in the Caledonian Mercury, Knox and Thomas (2015: 52) found only nine accounts of unsolved murders. If, on the one hand, the low figure might reveal the efficiency of the Scottish investigative procedures, it could also be the case that unsolved offences were carefully omitted by the editor or publisher for ideological or commercial reasons. As is the case in the London press, Scottish crime and trial accounts tend to highlight the effectiveness, conscientiousness and hard work of the court rather than acknowledge the stark reality of unpunished offences: We learn from Air, that on Saturday last the Trial of Serjeant David Edwards of General Holmes’s Regiment, for the Murder and Robbery of George Simpson a Soldier in the same Regiment, came on before the Lords Kilkerran and Auchinleck in the Circuit Court there; that the Trial lasted from six o’clock Saturday Morning, till five o’clock Sunday Morning, when the Jury inclosed, and sat for two Hours, and returned a Verdict, unanimously finding him guilty, and thereupon he was, on Monday last, sentenced to be hanged and hung in Chains, on the 30th of June next. (Caledonian Mercury, 13 May 1758) A query-­based analysis of the eighteenth-­century Irish press in the British Newspaper Archive, on the other hand, shows a different picture, with an abundant coverage of potentially unsolved offences. Accounts of murder and property offences were mostly reported on the third or fourth page of local newspapers in the form of advertisements where rewards were issued for help in the apprehension of offenders. The coverage of unsolved offences in the form of ads is consistent with testimonies of a major rise in urban crime, especially from the late eighteenth century (Henry 1994; Garnham 1997). Under the section headings ‘murder and robbery’ and ‘murder and rewards’, Irish readers could not only gain an insight into forms of spreading violence but also perceive lapses in investigation and policing. The very few reports of trial cases in the Irish courts are equally reflective of a general laxity in the justice system and of ‘a mistaken tenderness to the lives of the criminals’, especially murderers (Garnham 1997). Irish newspapers compensated for the scarcity of local crime accounts with news coming from London and with an increasing coverage of trial reports from the Old Bailey. For example, the Hibernian Journal devoted a special

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heading to the ‘Old Bailey Intelligence’ under the London column, with a very detailed account of sensational trials from the opening of the case to the prisoner’s defence (see, for example, 24–27 January 1783). The pervasiveness of the Old Bailey trial reports in the Scottish and Irish press has to be traced back to the marked increase in the volume of Old Bailey trial reporting in London newspapers (Deveraux 2007). From the 1780s many London dailies, far from simply summarising the output of the Old Bailey Proceedings, sought to obtain their own independent accounts from writer-­reporters who made a considerable income from performing this task (King 2007: 96). As King (2007) and Claridge (2021) point out, the vast majority of these detailed trial reports reflect the courtroom chronology and devote greater attention to the role of lawyers and judges. Mr. Howarth, the leading Counsel for the prosecution, proceeded to open the merits of this singular case, in a speech which took up an hour and a quarter in delivering: He set out with observing, that it was by no means his wish or intention to aggravate, by any description of his, the circumstances of the crime that was then to be submitted to the determination of the Case; for such was the nature of it, unluckily for the prisoner, who stood under the charge, that a bare and impartial narrative would be amply sufficient for those who had the conduct of the prosecution. Of all means, he said, which ingenious mischief had hitherto devised for the destruction of the human race, there were none so cruel nor so despicable as poison. [. . .] Cross-­examination by Mr. Newnham: The witness was asked if he had ever attended a dissection of a body supposed to be poisoned: He answered in the negative, but, at the same time, he thought himself authorised to argue from analogy, and the cases described to have taken place in Sir Theodosius Boughton very much resembled these which he had personally seen about poisoned animals. [. . .] Here the Judge summed up the evidence in a very accurate manner; his manner of summing it up shewed clearly that he considered the prisoner as guilty; but he told the Jury, they were neither to be biassed by prejudices without the Court, nor from even his opinion within; but as they conceived in their own breast, the prisoner to be guilty or innocent, so he wished them to pronounce their verdict . . . (London Chronicle, 1 April 1781)

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case study 18 : assassination of the archbishop 507 The mimetic rendering of the lawyers’, witnesses’ and judges’ speech creates a greater sense of immediacy and emotivity by shrinking the difference between newspaper report and trial proceedings. This growing similarity between the two genres is interpreted by Claridge as a missed opportunity on the part of news writers to ‘exploit their specific publication context to the full’ and create ‘a fully-­fledged crime report genre that catered to diverse, non-­specialist audiences’ (2021: 126). Even so, by the end of the century newspapers had become the most successful vehicle of crime information for the middling and upper sorts thanks to a skilful balance of diegesis and mimesis in a condensed account which was both swift to produce and to be consumed (Cecconi 2019b).

Conclusion In the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries crime and trial reporting underwent significant transformations, related to a shift of emphasis from crime as moral sin to crime as social problem to be solved through legal justice and reforms. Given their strong emotional appeal, crime stories found a steady place in the news market both in the form of occasional popular literature and periodical publications, albeit with some differences. While seventeenth-­century pamphleteers turned the crime event into an occasion for preaching and moralising, eighteenth-­century newspaper accounts were fact-­centred, impersonal and generally focused on the outcome of the Old Bailey court sessions. For more sensational trials, newspapers devoted entire columns to their reportage by including reported speech from the opening and closing sections of the trial and from the examination and cross-­examination of witnesses. In either case the rise in crime news coverage contributed to social unease, which the accounts of solved offences only partially succeeded in calming.

Case Study 18: Reporting the Assassination of the Archbishop of St Andrews, 1679 Elisabetta Cecconi In this case study I will exemplify how both Scottish Presbyterians and the London government in support of the established Church exploited the occasional crime pamphlet to report competing accounts of a sensational murder, perhaps the most spectacular in the reign of Charles II: the assassination of the Archbishop of St Andrews at the hands of a group of Scottish Presbyterians.

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The case study provides a snapshot of how crime reporting was readapted to the propaganda purposes of the opposing parties, by paying attention to the provenance of the (mis)information and its distribution across the country. On 3 May 1679 the Archbishop of St ­Andrews – ­accused by fellow congregationists of betraying the Presbyterian Church to re-­establish the episcopacy in ­Scotland – ­was brutally murdered while returning in his coach from Kennaway to St Andrews. The occasion was seized on by episcopalian pamphleteers and their Anglican co-­religionists to demonise Presbyterians as fanatics endowed with the same murderous and rebellious principles as the Papists (Erskine and Mason 2016). In the arena of contested news, anti-­Presbyterian, governmental crime pamphlets originated as a counter-­response to a Presbyterian murder pamphlet that justified the killing of the archbishop as an act of revenge for his evil behaviour towards one of his servants. The pamphlet, A True Relation Of what is Discovered concerning the MURTHER of the ArchbP of St Andrews and of what appears to have been the Occasion thereof, circulated freely without any indication of date, place, printer or publisher, thus revealing its clandestine character. In all probability, it was produced in Scotland and then sent down to London to be printed there by fellow Presbyterians shortly after the assassination. The first rebuttal to the outrageous Relation was published by Order of His Majesties Privy Council. The pamphlet, entitled A clear discovery of the malicious falsehoods contained in a Paper Printed at London, Intituled A TRUE RELATION . . ., was printed in Edinburgh by the official printer of the king. The introductory paragraph denounces the Covenanters’ pamphlet for ‘the falsehood whereof both Printer and Author appears to have been sufficiently convinced, neither of them daring to own it by prefixing their names unto it’ and vindicates the truth of the events and the reputation of the archbishop through a combination of 1) animadversion, 2) inclusion of a letter and 3) alternative murder reportage. Regarding animadversion, the author opts for a conflation of total and selective ad locum counter-­argumentation (Raymond 2003: 211) as he quotes the entire text in numbered paragraphs, each followed by his confutation; and then, in his rebuttal, he selects specific untenable passages from the original text so as to enhance the force of his narrative: It shall be unnecessary to say any more of the other manifest and barefaced lies contained in the foresaid Paper, such as that the murderers hurt none of his servants, except the Postilion; whereas the best armed of his servants was wounded in the head by a sword, and his Daughter, besides the wound of her Thumb, had another in her Thigh; and that they dragged him out of his Coach, whereas indeed he very composedly opened the door of the Coach himself, and with meekness and resolution stept out, and went forward to the murderers. (A Clear Discovery, 1679)

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case study 18 : assassination of the archbishop 509 The included copy of the original letter written by the Doctor of Divinity and Professor at the University of St Andrews, who had supervised the transaction between the archbishop and his servant, is another authenticating device. The author uses it as testimony of an authoritative voice with first-­hand knowledge of the matter. Regarding the murder reportage which closes the pamphlet, the two most salient pieces of information are the extremely positive presentation of the archbishop as a virtuous man and martyr and the identification of the murderers as a group of covenanting extremists, more precisely ‘9 Phanatick Ruffians’ whose names are providentially already known as being ‘all of them denunced, or intercommuned for frequenting field Conventicles’. In the course of the narrative the author zooms in on the gory details of the murder so as to highlight the brutality and inhumanity of the offenders by reusing the same rhetoric which characterised the atrocity pamphlets of the 1640s Irish Rebellion. The graphic rendering of the murder is combined with forensic detail and is dramatised through the fictionalised trope of the victim’s announcement of his death at the hands of the murderers (Gaskill 1998): They struck furiously at them and wounded him therein in three places, which nevertheless he kept up bleeding to Heaven, while one of them cut him to the Very bone, a little above the left eye, whereupon my Lord said: Now you have done the turn; then falling forward, he stretched himself out and laid his Head on his ­Arm . . . ­when some of the Villains from their Horses, and other afoot (having alighted) gave him about fifteen or sixteen wounds in the Head, and in effect, the whole Occipitial part was but one wound. (A Clear Discovery, 1679) A further licensed murder pamphlet was printed in London and reprinted in Dublin to counter the effects of the calumnious Relation and to extend the Protestant propaganda in Ireland where the Papists’ threat was constructed and perceived as stronger than ever. It was entitled A True Account of the Horrid Murther Committed upon His Grace, The Late Lord Archbishop of Saint Andrews . . . with a Detection of the LYES published in a late Scandalous RELATION of that Murther and the Pretended Occasion thereof. The pamphlet consists of a chronological narrative of the murder event which is inscribed within an overt providential framework followed by a list of points aimed at invalidating the Relation and enhancing the credibility of the Account. The ideologically biased assumption that divine Providence and the king work together for the just punishment of an execrable crime is clearly stated in the course of the narrative: But God having in an unexpected way furnished Probation against all who were present, it cannot but with a Dutiful Confidence be expected that His

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DIVINE MAJESTY who is so highly offended, by the same care, bring the Assassinates themselves to suffer for that crime. (A True Account, 1679) Two other murder pamphlets were printed in London: A Narrative of the Horrid Murther (1679) and A True Narrative of The late most Horrid and Barbarous Murder (1679). Both were mostly based on the murder reporting in A True Account, but while the former was enriched with a report of the Presbyterian Rebellion of 29 May and other barbarous acts, the latter provided a very simplified providential narrative of the event with no precise reference to political motivations, antecedents or consequences. Emphasis was given to an ideologically biased representation of the social actors whereby the murderers were labelled ‘Hell-­born Villains’ and ‘ravening Wolves’ whose ‘Fanatick Rage’ was compared to ‘Popish Cruelty, though otherwise dissembled’ and the archbishop was introduced as ‘the sacred pillar of this reformed Church, firm to his Prince and good to all’.

Chapter Twenty-­two

LITERARY AND REVIEW JOURNALISM Hye-Joon Yoon

Introduction The robust free market of print in eighteenth-­century Britain witnessed the birth of a new kind of journalism solely committed to informing readers of new publications. It was pioneered by the Monthly Review (1749) and fortified by its competitor, the Critical Review (1756). The book trade, centred in London and catering to a wide range of readers in Britain, erected a platform for launching a commercially viable enterprise to sustain this derivative genre of periodical publication. The objective conditions may have been ripe, but the enduring success of the Monthly and the Critical owed a great deal to the integrity, impartiality and versatility of those who were involved in the journals. The authority of the two monthly periodicals as guides to readers and guardians of criteria stood unchallenged in the mid-­eighteenth century. The anonymous author (Frances Burney) of Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady’s Entrance into the World (1778) dedicated her novel to the ‘Authors of the Monthly and Critical Reviews’. Appealing to the ‘impartiality’ as well as the ‘benevolence’ of the ‘Magistrates of the press, and Censors for the Public’, she entreated them to greet her work with those ‘generous sentiments by which liberal ­criticism . . . ­ought to be distinguished’ (Burney [1778] 2002: 5–7). Her readers would not have frowned on this apparently facetious ‘mock’ dedication (Justice 2002: 160). The two reviews were not only purchased by thousands of individual subscribers but were steadfastly collected by public institutions. Liverpool Library (established in 1758), Manchester Circulating Library (1765) and Leeds Library (1768) subscribed to both, as did the libraries of the university 511

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colleges in England and Scotland (Allan 2008b: 29; Roper 1978: 25). The ascendancy of the Monthly and the Critical incited the envy of numerous literary adventurers, so that by the end of the century there had ­appeared – ­and very often disappeared after a short ­life – s­ ome 265 literary periodicals presenting reviews, often along with original essays (Golden 1983a: xv). The chances of a new publication capturing the attention of the market depended increasingly on its being noticed by the two reviews rather than on the publisher’s advertising, which in newspapers had begun to decrease significantly by 1765 (Tierney 2009: 497). To appreciate the impact of the Monthly and the Critical on the contemporary print market, one has to bear in mind the supremely corporate nature of their enterprise. The articles constituting these reviews were never signed, concealing the identity of the reviewers and the network of their complicated mutual relationship in the London book market (Forster 2009: 639). A venerable strand in the studies of these periodicals has sought to penetrate the anonymity cloaking the monthly numbers. Identifying individual reviewers to match their unsigned reviews with their known convictions and dispositions is often understood as the objective of scholarly investigation (Nangle 1934: 1–47; Spector 1966: 32–4; Albrecht 1983b: 232–3; Basker 1988: 43–4). There is no warrant, however, to reduce the collaborative efforts of the reviewers to their individual whims, for they were institutional projects ostensibly independent of the personal creeds of those writing the articles (Donoghue 1996: 19). Besides, their politics did not matter all that much, since their primary mission was explication rather than instruction. One would be better off taking them at their word, as a corporate work undertaken together by ‘Several Hands’ (Monthly, 8, 1753, title page) or by ‘A Society of GENTLEMEN’ (Critical, 1, 1756, title page). One should also pay regard to the material features of the texts, such as typefaces, page layout and punctuation, for they matter nowhere as much as in these review articles commenting on and quoting from other printed works. But before we enter into details about the form and content of these two monthly periodicals, we first have to consider what significant predecessors there were, if any, in the earlier stages of the evolution of British journalism.

Literary Reviews before The Monthly Review While a commercial periodical entirely devoted to reviewing new publications did not exist before the Monthly, as long as there was a functioning print market, printed responses to other printed matters

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literary and review journalism 513 did play a role in Britain under varying circumstances of different historical conjunctures. During the ferocious ‘pamphlet wars’ supporting the military and political struggles of the Interregnum, the defeated and imprisoned monarch himself, Charles I, took part in the battle of books by writing at least the main body of a work later published as Eikon Basilike: The Portraiture of His Sacred Majesty in His Solitudes and Sufferings in February 1649, only ten days after his execution. The work became an instant bestseller, with no less than thirty-­five editions published in England in 1649, with editions also appearing in Ireland and on the Continent (Lacey 2007: 4). Those responsible for the king’s death commissioned John Milton to write a critical rebuttal of the personal reflections believed to have been penned by the recently beheaded king. The full title of the pamphlet, published in October and signed daringly with the author’s initials ‘I. M.’, named the title it was reviewing and stated its antagonistic purport: Eikonoklastes: Answer to a Book Intitl’d Eikon Basilike, The Portrature of his Sacred Majesty in his Solitudes and Sufferings. Years later, when the vicissitudes of political history brought back the son of the executed monarch to the British throne, all copies of Eikonoklastes, along with Defensio pro Populo Anglicano (1651) written by Milton to vindicate the regicide Commonwealth, were ordered by Charles II to be confiscated and burned, since they contained ‘most Impious endeavours to justifie the horrid and unmatchable Murther of Our late Dear father, of Glorious Memory’ (Charles II 1660). The pugnacious temper of the pamphlet wars during the Interregnum altered the meaning of the word ‘review’, hitherto largely synonymous with ‘revision’ and often accompanied by ‘corrected’ (Perkins 1596; Barnes 1607), by having it refer to a critical response to a published pamphlet written by a writer from the opposite side of the political divide. Titles of such ‘reviews’ would name the work being criticised and the stance chosen by the critic, as in the following case: A Review of the Seditious Pamphlet Lately Published in Holland by Dr. Bramhell, Pretended Bishop of London-­Derry; Entitled, His Faire Warning Against the Scots Discipline. in which, His Malicious and most Lying Reports, to the Great Scandall of that Government, are Fully and Clearly Refuted. as also, the Solemne League and Covenant of the Three Nations Justified and Maintained. (Baillie 1649) During and after the Interregnum, pamphlets attacking other works identified themselves as ‘A Review and Examination’ of a particular work (Hutcheson 1659; Vilant 1681). The political connotations

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attached to the word ‘review’ favoured its application to critical reflections on political affairs themselves, in which usage the inherent antagonism towards the reviewed topic could be muted, as exemplified by titles such as ‘A Short Review of the Remarkable Providences Attending our Gracious Sovereign William the IIId Continued from the Year 1693, Down to this Day’ (Whittel 1699). The ‘Remarkable Providences’ that brought forth the Glorious Revolution also permitted the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695, which silently brought to an end the era of pre-­publication censorship. Diverse species of periodicals appeared on varying publishing schedules. When one of the new journals called itself a ‘review’, it strengthened the more recent sense of the term to mean coverage of current affairs. A Review of the Affairs of France: With Observations on Transactions at Home (1704), an eight-­page weekly written singlehandedly by Daniel Defoe and published three times a week, mostly dealt with politics, with literary discussions having only a marginal presence (Evans 1983: 290–1). Periodical publications dedicated to reviewing books have a French, rather than British, precedent. Journal des sçavans, edited by Denis de Sallo and launched in 1665, lived up to its title by catering to the learned and the knowing, caring not to notice those titles that lacked scholarly and scientific worth. The Journal des sçavans was joined in the eighteenth century by Mémoires pour l’histoires des sciences et des beaux arts (1701) (Roper 1978: 19; Golden 1983a: xviii–ix). British imitators of these French journals were not slow to emerge in the dynamic London publishing world. Andrew Reid’s Present State of the Republick of Letters (1728–36), and its successor, The History of the Works of the Learned (1737–43), translated articles taken from the Parisian periodicals and published them each month (Golden 1983b: 276–7). Incomparably more influential than Reid’s scholarly magazine in the early eighteenth century were the periodical essays written by Richard Steele in the Tatler (1709–11), and its sequel the Spectator (1711), edited together with his schoolfellow Joseph Addison. The fame of these essays rested on their wry and witty comments on social mores. The two essayists anatomised the foibles of their contemporaries in the half-­sheet papers published three times a week, but they also allowed themselves the pleasure of indulging their literary tastes once in a while. Having a bent for the ancients, their discussion of contemporary literature was sparse and mostly confined to the stage. The Italian verses set to music by ‘Minheer Hendel, the Orpheus of our Age’, for instance, Addison judged to be a mere travesty of the ‘Writings of the old Italians, such as Cicero and Virgil’ (Addison and Steele 1891, I:

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literary and review journalism 515 121–2). The published English plays, on their part, clustered into a sorry mass of ‘raving incoherent ­Pieces . . . ­under odd Chimerical Titles’ concocted by some ‘Distempered Brain’ (Addison and Steele 1891, I: 320). Notwithstanding the disgruntled remarks of the Spectator about the ‘Chimerical Titles’ inundating the market, the print trade flourished and thrived in the first three decades of the eighteenth century to such an extent that a monthly periodical could emerge whose contents consisted of extracts from other periodicals. The Gentleman’s Magazine, founded by Edward Cave in 1731, included what it decided were the more memorable among the past month’s articles in the weekly, twice-­ weekly and thrice-­weekly journals (Tierney 2009: 488). Cave boldly took advantage of the silence of the 1710 Copyright Act regarding periodicals and extracts from other publications (Italia 2005: 110). On average, the Gentleman’s Magazine extracted articles from thirteen to sixteen different periodicals in the 1730s, although original contributions would gradually take up about half of its space in the subsequent decades (Ram 1999: 36–7). It enjoyed immense popularity, with circulation figures reaching 3,000 in the 1740s (Golden 1983a: xvii). The centrepiece of the Gentleman’s Magazine was politics, notably parliamentary debates, which were reported after partly erasing the speakers’ names (‘Proceedings and Debates in the first Session of the present Parliament, 1735’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 5, December 1735, 699). Examining recent publications was not one of this new periodical’s main preoccupations. Its occasional literary articles chose for the most part to address the dead masters, such as Shakespeare or Milton (Ram 1999: 144–56). Nonetheless, the Gentleman’s Magazine reserved a small section for ‘A Register of Books’ published each month (Figure 22.1), in which the habitually verbose titles, along with their publishers and prices, were listed in the form of a numbered catalogue, as exemplified below from the ‘Register’ for June 1733: 8. A View of the Real Power of the Pope, and of the Power of the Popish Clergy over the Laity; with an Account how they use it. To which is added, the seven Discourses of Abbe Fleury upon his Ecclesiastical History of the first 1400 Years after Christ. Published by T. H. Esq; Sold by J Nourse, pr. 3s. 6d. (‘A Register of Books publish’d in June, 1733’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 3, June 1733, 332) In listing new published titles, the Gentleman’s Magazine was meeting the challenge offered by its rival, the London Magazine, founded in

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Figure 22.1  ‘A Register of Books’, The Gentleman’s Magazine, 3 June 1733 (Courtesy of Hye-Joon Yoon)

1732, one year after the Gentleman’s Magazine. The London Magazine inserted from 1733 onwards ‘The Monthly Catalogue’ for each month, which, moreover, classified the titles into genres. In February 1733, for example, some seventy-­ four titles were distributed among the categories of ‘Chronology, History and Lives’, ‘Classical, Grammatical, and Mathematics’, ‘Miscellaneous’, ‘Physical and Philosophical’, ‘Plays, Poetry, and Entertainments’, ‘Politics’, ‘Sermons’ and ‘Theological’ (‘The Monthly Catalogue, for February, 1733’, London Magazine, 2, February 1733, 102–4). In the 1740s the Gentleman’s Magazine also began to classify the titles of monthly publications according to genre, which in April 1745 included ‘Entertainment and Poetry’, ‘Historical’, ‘Medicinal’, ‘Miscellaneous’, ‘Law, Political’ and ‘Sermons and Divinity’ (‘Register of Books for April 1745’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 14, April 1745, 224). The inevitable next step would seem to be a more selective kind of catalogue, in which the contents of the classified titles would be described in the classifying persons’ own words. Yet the editors of these

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literary and review journalism 517 monthly magazines, busy competing with each other, did not consider taking that extra step to be particularly urgent.

The Material Production of The Monthly Review and The Critical Review In launching the Monthly in May 1749, Ralph Griffiths, a relatively obscure London ‘bookseller’ (as publishers were called at the time), was taking a huge risk. The price of the eighty-­page booklet was one shilling, when the monthly miscellanies were sold at six pence (Ram 1999: 18). The double columns of the Gentleman’s Magazine and the London Magazine contained more printed words than the single-­ column pages of the Monthly. The range and format of the articles, solely dealing with recently published works, were also far more restricted than the magazines. Yet this new species of periodical journalism not only consolidated its place in the contemporary print market but became the model for similar periodicals, beginning with the Critical Review (1756). The editor of the new 1749 monthly pleaded his case for presenting this new product to the public by alerting readers to the need for an antidote to the ‘abuse’ of the long ‘title-­pages’ which often promised more than was actually offered: The cure then for this general complaint is evidently, and only, to be found in a periodical work, whose sole object should be to give a compendious account of those productions of the press, as they come out, that are worth notice; an account, in short, which should, in virtue of its candour, and justness of distinction, obtain authority enough for its re-­presentations to be serviceable to such as would choose to have some idea of a book before they lay out their money or time on it. (‘Advertisement’, Monthly, 1, May 1749, [79]) Each ‘account’ followed the general practice of London periodicals of keeping the authorship of the article anonymous. It also lived up to its promise to be ‘serviceable’ to the potential customer by giving them the full title of the works, as did the monthly magazine’s catalogue of books, but went a little further to specify also their size: Free and candid disquisitions relating to the church of England, and the means of advancing religion therein. Addressed to the governing powers in church and state, and more immediately directed to the two houses of convocation. Printed for A. Millar in the Strand, Octavo, pages 340.

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Such bibliographical information, presented in italics (and roman instead of the italics in the original title page), appeared as the title of the articles, which in this instance went straight on to tell the reader what to expect: ‘The design of this book is to point out such things in our ecclesiastical establishment, as want to be reviewed and amended; a design truly excellent, and executed with great candor and modesty’ (‘Free and candid disquisitions’, Monthly, 1, July 1749, 198). The monthly ‘re-­presentations’ of published works by the Monthly were collected into a volume and published serially twice a year with an index. In the Monthly’s third volume (1750), the subtitle of the periodical claimed it was a ‘New Literary Journal’, which was slightly modified to ‘The Monthly Review; or, Literary Journal’ in volume 6 in 1752. The Monthly specialised in ‘literary’ reviews in the eighteenth-­ century sense of the term, as did the Critical, whose subtitle in the collected volumes was ‘Annals of Literature’. For both periodicals, ‘literature’ always meant something much broader than belles lettres (Roper 1978: 37). Of the eleven books reviewed extensively in February 1751 by the Monthly, four dealt with religious topics and two with natural science (Monthly, 4, February 1751). Of the nine main articles covering domestic publications in the Critical in September 1756, three addressed questions of religion, and four described new works on politics and science (Critical, 2, September 1756). Adam Anderson’s An Historical and Chronological Deduction of the Origin of Commerce, an entirely non-­literary work, was extolled by the Monthly as a ‘principal desiderata of ancient and modern Literature’ (‘An Historical and Chronological Deduction of the Origin of Commerce’, Monthly, 30, February 1764, 81). Much more inclusive than Reid’s academic review magazine imitating the French models, Griffiths sought to appeal to a general reading public by selecting serious works of theology, philosophy, history, science and commerce, which were not too forbiddingly specialist in their language or scope (Albrecht 1983b: 231). The Monthly saw its sales grow steadily as the years and volumes accumulated. The circulation figures ranged in 1751 from 500 to 1,000, but rose to 2,500 in 1758, and further to 3,500 in 1776 (Knapp 1958: 216–17). Buoyed up by success, the Monthly began to publish an ‘Appendix’ for each volume, to be sold at six pence, to make up for any serious ‘omission’ in the monthly numbers (‘Advertisement’, Monthly, 8, June 1753, 480). The periodical sought to maximise inclusiveness at more than one level. It made sure that it left out no one who had the time and money to purchase it. The reviewers always kept in view the ‘English reader’, that is, those who lacked classical education, as well as those who did not (‘Odes of Pindar’, Monthly, 1, May 1749, 39). A

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more important barrier than education was a person’s finances. The regular readership who subscribed to the review periodicals excluded those who could not afford to spend a shilling each month on cultural consumption, to which social strata most members of the working classes belonged (Feather 2007: 245). Yet beyond those individuals who had the means and inclination to subscribe to the reviews and to purchase the books they recommended, the corporate subscribers, the libraries and book clubs such as those mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, enabled a broader range of readers from the lower rungs of the social ladder to keep in touch with current publications (Roper 1978: 24–5). The business of publishing review magazines, whatever their sales figures, did not necessarily secure easy profits for the proprietors. Purchasing the books to be reviewed took up a sizeable portion of the budget, particularly for the Critical, edited and partly owned by Tobias Smollett along with the publisher Archibald Hamilton (Basker 1988: 32–3). The Monthly, on the other hand, being managed by Griffiths, who was himself a ‘bookseller’ in the modern sense of the term, felt less pressure in this regard. Yet Griffiths suffered severe financial tribulations. He had to sell a share of his rights to Benjamin Collins in 1761 (Albrecht 1983b: 234; Tierney 2009: 496) and, as stated in the volume title in 1763, to ‘T. Becket and P. A. De Hondt’ (Monthly, 29, 1763, title page), which was later reduced to ‘T. Becket’ (Monthly, 50, 1774, title page). The entrance into the market of a formidable rival played a part in reducing the profit margins of Griffiths’ periodical. The Critical offered ninety-­ six pages of reviews, whereas the Monthly did not exceed eighty at first. But the competition soon compelled the Monthly to expand its bulk to ninety-­six pages in February 1756 (Spector 1983: 73; Basker 1988: 46). The payment of reviewers was also a constant burden, for instead of being a pack of impoverished hacks, as had been at times alleged by certain sources in the nineteenth century, the ‘Authors of the Monthly and Critical Reviews’ were learned and respectable specialists (Roper 1978: 29–30; Albrecht 1983b: 233; Basker 1988: 43–4), who were remunerated, on average, at the decent rate of two guineas per sheet. The Monthly is known to have paid as much as four guineas to its top-­ tier reviewers in the 1770s (Basker 1988: 49). Those writing the reviews were compensated not only for their own original writings, but also for the extracts or long quotations, which on average occupied about two-­ thirds of each article. Extracting large segments of the reviewed work was considered to be a legitimate part of the reviewers’ labour, mainly because readers thought so (Roper 1978: 43). The assumption was

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that the reviewers respected the readers’ ability to judge for themselves without being told what to think by the critic (Basker 1988: 67). Given the importance of the extracts, visibly demarcating them from the reviewers’ comments became a matter of vital concern. Quotation marks, which came to be adopted for this purpose, were still in the process of being standardised in the second half of the eighteenth century (Parkes 1992: 59; Salmon 1999: 40). Various efforts to stabilise this form of punctuation were made by the literary reviews, when the older practice of italicising quotations was still widely used in the pages of books and pamphlets. There was some wavering between different styles of quotation, particularly in the Monthly. In the pages printed in 1749, every single line of the quoted passage was marked by a single quotation mark at the left margin, with double quotation marks used for quotations within the extract (‘The Enthusiasm of the Methodists and Papists compared’, Monthly, 1, August 1749, 282). The striking effect created by the quotation marks piled on the left margin, which followed the precedents of previous centuries (Parkes 1992: 58), would have pleased the reader. But it meant extra work for the typesetters. In May 1750 the less arduous practice of marking only the beginning of each paragraph, rather than each line, with a single quotation mark was attempted (‘An Essay on the Roman Senate’, Monthly, 3, May 1750, 31–4). This continued for some time until July 1752, when the extracts in the Monthly reverted to the line quotation marks (‘Chronological Antiquities’, Monthly, 7, July 1752, 3–6). The Critical followed at first the quotation style of the Monthly, often adding ‘says he’ in parenthesis to introduce the extracts (‘The Use of Reason asserted in Matters of Religion’, Critical, 1, April 1756, 275). However, the Critical made the decision to definitively part from this archaic tradition in March 1759, indicating the beginning of quoted paragraphs with single quotation marks (‘A Treatise on the eye, the Manner, and Phœnomena of Vision’, Critical, 7, March 1759, 207–9). The Monthly hesitated, using both modes until July 1761, when it finally settled into opening quoted paragraphs with double quotation marks (‘An Enquiry into the Nature and Design of Christ’s Temptation in the Wilderness’, Monthly, 25, July 1761, 138–40). The Monthly and the Critical – rather than Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1748), as Keith Houston claims (Houston 2013: 203) – made significant contributions to establishing the standard of quotation marks in English script.

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Making Distinctions and Preserving Values Publishing each month ‘a compendious account of those productions of the press, as they come out’ and preserving a ‘justness of distinction’ – which the Monthly vowed to do in the ‘Advertisement’ appended to its first ­number – ­was by no means an easy task, for the periodical had to cope with the ever-­growing number of new products of various sizes, lengths and contents seeking potential customers in the London print market. A handy device, adopted by the Monthly in July 1749, was to segregate the titles into two tiers: those deserving full coverage in the main articles and those to be noticed with shorter remarks in the ‘Monthly Catalogue’ for each month. From June 1751 the Monthly began to classify the monthly catalogue titles into genres, in the manner of the Gentleman’s and the London magazines. The categories dividing the fourteen articles in the ‘Monthly Catalogue, for October 1751’, in the order of appearance, were ‘Divinity and Morality’, ‘Poetry’, ‘Miscellaneous’ and ‘Medical’ (Monthly, 5, October 1751, 396–9). The ‘Monthly Catalogue’ titles of the Critical in 1771 were placed under the headings of ‘Poetry’, ‘Novels’, ‘Medical’, ‘Divinity’ and ‘Miscellaneous’ (Critical, 31, 1771, 226–44). A notable change in the classificatory scheme was the separation of ‘Novels’ in the 1770s from ‘Miscellaneous’, where they had previously been confined, but what did not change was the fundamental distinction between the two groups, which was fortified by the material appearance of the page. The typefaces for the catalogues were smaller than those in the first group, and the ‘account’ in the catalogues usually did not exceed one page, and at times could be extremely blunt, the shortest being a single phrase: ‘A Lying Grub’ (‘The Speech of the Honourable Admiral Byng’, Monthly, 16, March 1757, 283). Whereas the main articles were counted in Roman numbers, the titles in the monthly catalogue were given Arabic numerals (in the Critical from August 1756 and in the Monthly from September 1765 onwards). At the upper end of the hierarchy, the more important works were granted the distinction of being serialised for two or three months. The review of Edward Gibbon’s The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, for instance, was spread over three separate numbers from March (Monthly, 54, March 1776, 188–95) to July 1776, with the sequels bearing in their titles the words ‘Continuation’ (Monthly, 54, May 1775, 388) and ‘Conclusion’ (Monthly, 55, July 1776, 41). A periodical that functioned at once as a consumers’ guide and a self-­appointed tribunal exercising the power to determine the worth of new publications by assigning their place in the pages of each

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monthly number had to build a rhetorical arsenal that underscored its impartiality. The writers of the printed matter in question were called ‘our Author’, who ‘endeavours to shew’ (‘An Essay upon Money and Commerce’, Monthly, 17, August 1757, 113) or ‘says’ (‘A Short History of Barbados’, Monthly, 39, July 1768, 18) things which the reviewer, adopting the persona of plural ‘we’, reported and cited for the readers’ benefit. The more accomplished or talented among the authors were awarded the title of ‘our ingenious author’ (‘The Truth of the Gospel History shewed, in Three Books’, Critical, 18, November 1764, 332). What the reviewers were examining and judging was called the ‘performance before us’ (‘The Covenant of Grace, and Baptism the Token of it’, Monthly, 17, October 1757, 345). After a brief preamble, a ‘specimen of our author’s abilities’ (‘Letters from an old man to a young prince, with the answers’, Critical, 1, March 1756, 117) would be presented to the reader in the form of sumptuous extracts, so that the reader might ‘judge of the rest of his performance’ (‘Hermes: or, A Philosophical Inquiry concerning Language and Universal Grammar’, Monthly, 6, February 1752, 130). Judicious selection was as important as detailed evaluation, for the extracts were expected to ‘serve to convey some idea of our author’s merit’ (‘St. Peter’s Christian Apology’, Critical, 1, September 1756, 144). When the reviewers announced their judgement, they did so only ‘after a careful perusal’ (‘The Trial of the Hon. Admiral Byng’, Critical, 3, March 1757, 230) and always mindful of their duty as ‘impartial critics’ (‘Continuation of the Complete History of England’, Critical, 14, August 1762, 131). They appealed to the sound common sense of ‘every impartial Reader’ (‘A Letter to the Author of the Critical Review’, Monthly, 17, September 1757, 279), when they ‘reluctantly pointed out the author’s defects’ (‘The History of England’, Monthly, 20, April 1759, 364), and even more so when they ‘congratulate the public’ on the appearance of a superb ‘production’ (‘The Traveller, or a Prospect of Society’, Critical, 18, December 1764, 462). Yet one might suspect that the rhetoric of impartiality deployed by the two rival reviews concealed their hidden political agendas, necessarily opposed to each other. Indeed, certain previous studies of the Monthly and the Critical have alleged as much, suggesting that the Monthly, edited by Griffiths, served Whiggish interests, whereas the Critical, edited by Smollett, stood faithful to ‘Tory’ principles, largely because these individuals were known to have these political allegiances (Spector 1966: 32–4; 1983: 74; Roper 1978: 21–2; Donoghue 1996: 24). This is only partially true. The initial difference and animosity between the two reviews did not last beyond the first phase of a pioneer in the business accommodating a new competitor (Basker

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literary and review journalism 523 1988: 62–3). During what the historian J. G. A. Pocock termed ‘the first eighteenth century’ that ended in 1776 (Pocock 1985: 102), the two reviews more or less set up a joint front against what they perceived to be threats to the values their subscribers and they themselves held to be important, above all, those based on Protestant Christianity. The predominance of religious books among the titles reviewed by both periodicals reflected their heavy presence in the book market itself (Suarez 2009: 46–8). It also bespeaks the solicitude the reviewers felt for the plight of rational Protestantism in Britain, besieged on one side by religious scepticism, regularly stirred up by French writers, and on the other side by native ‘enthusiasm’ which denied the validity of rational inquiry into moral and religious problems. Of the myriad voices heard among the reviews expressing the former species of concern, one could select their verdict on a work that acquired unimpeachable fame in the subsequent age of secularism. When Voltaire’s Candide was translated into English in 1759, the Monthly predicted the British readers’ response in these words: An absurd, improbable tale, written with an apparent view to depreciate not only human nature, but the goodness and wisdom of the Supreme Author of our being, we dare be confident, can afford them little satisfaction. (‘Candid, or all for the best’, Monthly, 21, July 1759, 84) The Critical reacted in a similar vein to the second part of Candide translated two years later: We ­cannot . . . ­upon the whole approve any design, that tends to degrade human nature, arraign the justice of Providence, render us dissatisfied with our existence, and to ridicule the moral and physical œconomy, established in the world by the author of our being. (‘Candid: or, All for the Best’, Critical, 12, August 1761, 138) Of the numerous strictures on the latter kind of menace, one could select two representative titles. The Critical found vital reason to welcome The Doctrine of Grace: or, the Office and Operations of the Holy Spirit Vindicated from the Insults of Infidelity, and the Abuses of Fanaticism, written by the Bishop of Gloucester (William Warburton), as ‘the best and most effectual antidote against the spreading poison of Methodism’ (Critical, 14, December 1762, 385). The Monthly, for its part, even as it admitted ‘Mr. ­Wesley . . . ­stands his ground manfully’ against the bishop (‘A Letter to the Right Reverend the Lord Bishop of Glocester’, Monthly, 28, March 1763, 235), considered A Specimen of Preaching, as practiced amongst the People called Methodists to

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be a fair exposure of ‘the manner in which the Fanatics take upon them to treat the sublime truths of Christianity’, which ‘cannot fail to shock both the ear and the understanding of all those who make any good pretensions either to religion or common-­sense’ (‘A Specimen of Preaching’, Monthly, 27, September 1762, 236–7). Competitors as they were, the Monthly and the Critical were both ‘friends to a rational method of treating religious subjects’ (‘The Principles and Practices of the Methodists farther considered’, Monthly, 25, August 1761, 124). In less polemical domains, such as that of prose fiction, the two reviews had even less to disagree on. With regard to Evelina, with which we started this chapter, the Monthly first greeted it favourably in April 1778, albeit in a single-­paragraph notice in the ‘Monthly Catalogue’, by assuring the reader that ‘we do not hesitate to pronounce it one of the most sprightly, entertaining, and agreeable productions of this kind, which has of late fallen under our notice’ (‘Evelina’, Monthly 58, April 1778, 316). In September the Critical placed the novel among the works reviewed by its main articles, for it thought the ‘performance deserves no common praise, whether we consider it in a moral or literary light’ (‘Evelina’, Critical, 46, September 1778, 202). On the other hand, in entering the combative arena of political pamphlets, which occupied each month a steady portion of the ‘Monthly Catalogue’ articles, a modicum of party spirit at times garnished the reviewers’ language. However, the well-­known ordeal that Smollett suffered for his attack in the Critical on Admiral Knowles’s self-­ vindication of his decisions during the Seven Years War is an extremely exceptional case. The Monthly, to keep aloof from controversy, merely commended the admiral’s willingness to offer an ‘open unreserved explication of his behaviour’, without entering into the merits of the case (‘The Conduct of Admiral Knowles’, Monthly, 18, June 1758, 621). The language of the Critical, by contrast, was unusually vituperative. The reviewer, Smollett himself, described the author of the pamphlet as ‘an ignorant, assuming, officious, scribbling pretender; conceited as a peacock, obstinate as a mule, and mischievous as a monkey’ (‘The Conduct of Admiral Knowles’, Critical, 5, May 1758, 438). The insulted admiral retaliated in kind. He successfully prosecuted the reviewer for libel and made him serve three months in prison (Boucé 1967: 36–7; Basker 1988: 148). That this remains a lone incident among hundreds of review articles commenting on volatile political publications is testimony to the cautious temper, if not genuine impartiality, of the two leading reviews of the century.

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Dissemination and Divisions The Monthly and the Critical together built a new form of journalism in the 1750s and 1760s, which the older monthly miscellanies gradually felt the need to respect. In the 1750s the Gentleman’s Magazine began to add critical ‘remarks’ to its catalogue of newly published books (‘Books published in December; with Remarks’, Gentleman’s Magazine, 25, December 1755, 574–5). The London Magazine followed suit in the 1760s by reserving pages for its ‘Catalogue of Books; with Remarks’ (29, February 1760, 111–12), which evolved into ‘An Impartial Review of New Publications’ (38, January 1769, 41–5) by adopting the format and tone of the review magazines. The London Magazine even sought to censor the two reviews themselves, castigating in a series of articles their ‘crude effusions of ignorance, partiality and prejudice’ (‘The Monthly and Critical Reviews contrasted’, London Magazine, 40, December 1771, 609). However much the influence of the Monthly and the Critical were resented, they were broadly imitated even as they were denounced. In the 1770s the Gentleman’s Magazine added a new section, ‘Review of Books’ (45, November 1775, 531–9) to supplement its ‘Catalogue of new Publications’. The Literary Magazine, founded in 1756, provided extended book reviews written (anonymously) by its editor Samuel Johnson, along with topical and miscellaneous articles. Johnson’s resignation, only after four numbers, from the magazine’s editorial role led to the decay of its review section and ultimately to the magazine’s demise in 1758 (Albrecht 1983a: 198–200). The Annual Register, edited in its early years by Edmund Burke, did not forget to close each of its annual volumes with a review of books published in that year. A select list of three to five titles were reviewed, mostly by Burke himself (Bourke 2015: 201), complete with long extracts in the manner of the Monthly (‘An Account of Books published in 1759’, Annual Register, 1760, 464–94). Like everything else under the sun, the domination of the two review magazines waned as history marched forward. The moral and political certainties of mid-­eighteenth-­century Britain began to be shaken in the 1780s in the wake of the war with the American colonies, and more drastically in the 1790s by the shock waves of the French Revolution. The print market itself experienced unprecedented turmoil. Prices of books and pamphlets, which had remained remarkably stable throughout the century, became volatile in the 1790s (Feather 2007: 245). The soaring number of published works pouring into the market overwhelmed the capacity of the monthly catalogues of the two reviews. The Monthly had to start a new series in 1790 (the Critical followed in

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1791), expanding its size and increasing its price by 50 per cent (Forster 2009: 636). It confessed to its subscribers that it had no choice but to do so, since ‘the productions of the press, in this country alone, began to overflow the narrow limits of the plan’ it had used for decades (‘To The Literary World’, Monthly, 81, 1789, ii). The nature of review journalism itself was being transformed. The new review magazines which appeared in the final phase of the century abandoned the gentlemanly posture of impartiality preserved by the Monthly and the Critical by unabashedly professing their political beliefs. The Analytical Review (launched in 1788) was Radical and Unitarian, against which the AntiJacobin Review threw down the gauntlet in 1798 (Roper 1978: 22–3; Forster 2009: 641). The Critical itself was more outspokenly political in its new series, becoming more Whiggish than the Monthly (Roper 1978: 176–7; Spector 1983: 75). The age of common sense was being replaced by the age of contention.

Case Study 19: The Scottish Enlightenment in The Monthly Review and The Critical Review Hye-Joon Yoon ‘Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expence’, wrote Samuel Johnson in 1759 (The Idler, no, 60; Johnson 1963: 184). This statement may be true as a general maxim, but criticism as practised by the reviewers of the Monthly and the Critical was by no means a cheap trade, for they had to earn the respect of the public by their diligence and their insight. Above all, they were prompt and unfailing in recognising real merit among the crowd of new publications cramming the market. This is evidenced most eloquently by their reception of works that have come to be recognised in our time as constituting the ‘Scottish Enlightenment’, many of which were reviewed in serialised main articles with generous extracts. By enthusiastically greeting the Scottish thinkers’ writings, the two influential reviews enhanced their worth in the eyes of the national reading public (Allan 2008b: 47). Most frequently noticed, in part because of his relatively frequent output, was David Hume, whose philosophical and historical works, particularly the latter, never failed to earn the admiration, sometimes mixed with animadversion, of the reviewers. The leading article of the Monthly’s January 1752 number, as well as the one that followed it, reviewed Hume’s works, paying tribute to the ‘reputation this ingenious author has acquir’d as a fine and elegant writer’ (‘An Enquiry concerning the Principles of Morals’, Monthly, 6, January 1752, 1). The second article went on to introduce his collection of essays, ‘Printed at Edinburgh, for Kincaid and Donaldson’. The leading London periodical

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case study 19 : the scottish enlightenment 527 serialised this product of the Edinburgh press for two more months, all the while praising the essays for their ‘solid reflections’ on ‘curious and interesting subjects’ (‘Political Discourses’, Monthly, 6, January 1752, 19). Hume’s History of Great Britain also attracted respectful attention. However, not everything could be applauded this time. His ‘singular’ views about Christianity, as implied in his portrayal of the Reformation, the reviewer could not embrace, as it left nothing between the extremes of ‘superstition’ and ‘fanaticism’ (Monthly, 12 March 1755, 229). The Critical, always alert to linguistic misdeeds, spotted a few ‘Scoticisms’ in the historian’s language (Critical, 2, December 1756, 394). A more serious cause of complaint for both the Monthly and the Critical was ‘the gloom of infidelity’ (‘Four Dissertations’, Monthly, 16, February 1757, 122) tincturing the writings of ‘this sagacious, this animated writer’, since it was bound to ‘terminate in the blind amazement, the diffidence and melancholy of mankind’ (‘Dialogues concerning Natural Religion’, Critical, 48, September 1779, 171). On Hume’s less prolific friend Adam Smith was bestowed unalloyed praise, largely for the same reason that led the reviewers to express their concern about the ‘ingenious’ Hume. The Theory of Moral Sentiments, on its appearance in April 1759, was reviewed first by the Critical in May, in whose eyes the great achievement of the work written by a ‘professor of moral philosophy in the university of Glasgow’ was to have constructed a naturalistic argument about morality while carefully avoiding all paths that led ‘into impiety or infidelity’ (Critical, 7, May 1759, 399). The Monthly, two months later, expressed its approval in kindred terms, commending the author for ‘the strictest regard preserved, throughout, to the principles of religion’ (Monthly, 21, July 1759, 18). By the same token, when James Beattie, professor of ‘Moral Philosophy and Logic in the Marischal College and University of Aberdeen’, published his treatise refuting agnosticism, the Monthly wholeheartedly recommended it to the readers as a ‘performance’ providing ‘an excellent antidote against scepticism and infidelity’ (‘An Essay on the Nature and Immutability of Truth’, Monthly, 42, June 1770, 450). As champions of rational religion, the reviews lauded the Scottish Protestant thinkers’ sound moral sense and balanced spirituality. The Sermons by Hugh Blair, an author introduced in the title of the article as ‘One of the Ministers of the High Church, and Professor of Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the University, of Edinburgh’, was welcomed with extended review articles. The Critical felt confident that ‘the merit of these admirable discourses’ – abounding with the ‘Preacher’s judicious observations upon human life’, as the Monthly had commented a few months earlier (Monthly, 56, April 1777, 277) – sufficiently outweighed occasional blemishes in style (Critical, 44, August 1777, 108). A figure who represented all that was praiseworthy about Scottish thinkers of the age in the eyes of the two reviews was William Robertson, ‘D.D. Principal of

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the University of Edinburgh, and Historiographer to his Majesty for Scotland’, in whom they found a trustworthy historian free from the ‘singularity’ and ‘infidelity’ of Hume. ‘Our worthy Historian’ produced in The History of Scotland a work which the Monthly could safely recommend ‘as the most compleat of all modern histories’ (Monthly, 20, February 1759, 177). Soaring above the ‘herd of historians’ seeking fame, Robertson offered in The History of America a historical narration which was ‘all alive, and animated with theory’ (Critical, 44, August 1777, 128). The Monthly’s encomium was even more elegant. The History of America was marked by ‘that happy union of strength and grace which becomes the majesty of the historic Muse’ (Monthly, June 1777, 457). Although posterity might not agree with these two reviews regarding the virtues of Robertson, it would undoubtedly be pleased with the honour conferred by the Critical on the ‘ingenious author’ of An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations in serialising its review of the book for no less than four months (March–June 1776). Smith’s masterpiece was extolled for having conquered a realm which ‘is perhaps the most intricate of any within the compass of literature’ (Critical, 41, March 1776, 193). Admirers of the work in our time might be displeased by the use of the term ‘literature’ in this compliment, since the word has lost so much of its territory as to deprive the review periodicals of the right to call themselves a ‘literary journal’ or ‘annals of literature’.

Chapter Twenty-­three

PRESS AND POLITICS IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY Lena Liapi

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he seventeenth century saw the emergence of the periodical press in Britain. This had significant implications for the political landscape, a development that has given rise to a host of scholarly publications. From the initial appearance of the avvisi in the sixteenth century, news in manuscript which normally communicated information from diplomats, news and politics have been intimately connected (Raymond and Moxham 2016: 8). This chapter will analyse how new scholarship has reworked traditional areas of debate on the press and politics: the role of newspapers in the development of public opinion, the significance of print in the ‘news revolution’ and the almost exclusive focus on England (rather than Britain) when examining the development of the periodical press.1 Early analyses of the periodical press idealised it as an agent of freedom, aimed at ‘speaking truth to power’. The Whig view of the evolution of the press ­is – ­predictably – a history of progress, where initial haphazard reporting of news in the sixteenth century becomes increasingly bolder and more sophisticated, reaching its peak (or ‘maturity’) in the 1640s (Frank 1961). It is also an exclusively English story: there is no mention of the Scottish or Irish press. The English press is conceptualised as being in battle against the powers of absolutism and censorship. This metanarrative gained more impetus with the translation into English of Jürgen Habermas’s work The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere in 1989. Habermas argued that ‘the state-­governed public sphere was appropriated by the public of private people making 1

I would like to thank Dr Ian Atherton for kindly reading a draft version of this chapter. I would also like to thank Panagiotis Georgakakis, who allowed me to use his transcripts of French-­ speaking newspapers from the Netherlands.

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use of their reason and was established as a sphere of criticism of public authority’ ([1962] 1989: 51). This highlights the extent to which the ‘public sphere’ is envisaged in opposition to the claims of the state. Habermas located the emergence of the public sphere after the 1695 lapse of the Licensing Act, highlighting the role of the press in the formation of a public opinion antagonistic to the state, but also the role of censorship in stifling oppositional voices. The Habermasian concept of the public sphere has been adapted to earlier periods, but has also been widely critiqued (Pincus 1995; Lake and Pincus 2006; Downie 2005; Mah 2000). Recent works in this field have provided more nuanced accounts of newspapers’ potential for informing and shaping public opinion, as well as of censorship. Since the first days of the emergence of print, princes and politicians showed concern about its potential for widening access to political information. The arcana imperii were supposed to remain hidden from the prying eyes of the multitude. This is exemplified by Charles William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle, who advised Charles II to ban all newspapers because ‘every man now has become a statesman, both home and abroad, merely due to the weekly gazette’ (Anzilotti 1988: 156–7). Censorship was a solution to this problem, but its effectiveness has been fiercely debated by scholars. From an initial belief that censorship was all-­encompassing and draconian (Siebert 1952; on Scotland, see Couper 1908, I: 77–90), revisionist historians such as D. F. McKenzie, Cyndia Clegg, Sabrina Baron and Sheila Lambert have argued that censorship was ineffective because the licensing system could easily be evaded, and that the system of post-­ publication sanctions was reactive, used only against a small proportion of texts that were deemed offensive (Clegg 1997; Lambert 1992; McKenzie 2002a). Baron has characterised the censorship system as ‘only erratically successful’ (2001: 42). Jason McElligott, however, has argued that the Stationers’ Company was able to enforce legislation on licensing and that the licensing laws provided an ‘industry-­wide standard framework’ for regulation, and allowed for the selective punishment of minor transgressions (2012: 145). Jason Peacey has shown that in 1649 government employees were chosen as licensers for the official journals, suggesting a willingness to bring these publications under closer scrutiny (2006b: 114). Post-­publication sanctions were more effective against newspapers in any case, as publishers relied on being known so that readers could buy new issues; in consequence, newspaper editors were less likely to take risks (Knights 2005: 225). Another criticism of the emancipatory power of newspapers relates to the extent to which such media were employed by the state. The

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press and politics in the seventeenth century 531 initial period of nervousness about print and news publications did not last long. The outbreak of the Civil War in the 1640s was followed (and precipitated) by a flurry of publications from both sides. Jason Peacey has analysed the publication of Mercurius Aulicus in 1643 as a case of the king realising the need to counter the parliamentarian printed narrative. The increased employment of ‘official’ printers for newspaper publication suggests an understanding of newspapers’ potential for propaganda (Peacey 2006b: 107). The Commonwealth also opted to control the news, rather than merely clamping down on such publications, establishing Marchamont Nedham’s Mercurius Politicus as its official newspaper (Raymond 1998a). As we will see later, the Cromwellian government also established newspapers in Scotland and Ireland in order to act as propagandists for the regime. Another method for establishing state control over the news was through the provision of intelligence for various newspapers. In the 1650s the Secretaries of State established a network of intelligence agents; this allowed them to select and feed appropriate news to official newspapers (Peacey 2004b: 203–35). The lessons learned in this period were not forgotten with the establishment of the London Gazette in 1665. The Gazette has long been seen as the ‘official voice of the government’ and by consequence ignored as a dull mouthpiece (Snyder 1968: 220; Nelson and Seccombe 2002: 545). Nonetheless, the Gazette has recently been reconceptualised as a more nuanced ‘intelligencer’, embedded in the intelligence networks of the Secretaries of State (Glaisyer 2017: 261). The Gazette was employed by the government as a vehicle for the publication of information to its subjects (such as proclamations from the Crown, lists of officials, loyal addresses), but as Glaisyer has shown, it was an ideological and a financial endeavour, with which readers engaged critically (2019: 70). However, the employment of newspapers as propagandists for the state also led to the growth of reader scepticism. As Brendan Dooley has shown, readers were worried that ‘the construction of events was just another negotiable aspect of the discourse of power’ (2001: 276). This scepticism was also illustrated in examples of readers cross-­referencing stories published in the London Gazette, or highlighting what pieces of news were omitted (Glaisyer 2017: 262). All these qualifications of the role of newspapers as agents of freedom do not, however, detract from the observation that there was significant interest in appealing to public opinion and that newspapers were an effective medium for doing so. In Britain, even the term ‘popularity’, which had long been viewed as derogatory (used for those who pandered to the ‘multitude’), acquired more neutral connotations at

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least from 1660 (Arblaster et al. 2016: 96). Mark Knights claims that through frequent elections, petitions and a ‘free press’, the public was conceptualised as a judge of public affairs in the later Stuart period (Knights 2005: 273; Pincus 1995: 811). Even though there is significant scepticism, as we have seen, about the extent to which the press was ever ‘free’, most scholars agree that from the late seventeenth century the public (broadly interpreted) was expected to know about domestic political events and to assess their significance. This was neither fully realised nor accepted as a positive development; on the contrary, many political figures and elite readers expressed concern about the ability of the public to separate truth from falsehood and to avoid manipulation (Knights 2005: 273). Nonetheless, the publication of news of state was deemed necessary for bolstering the legitimacy of successive regimes after 1660. This was evident in the newspapers that reported on parliamentary affairs: the Votes of the House of Commons was published in 1681 and again in 1689; in the same year, the Account of the Proceedings of the Meeting of the Estates in Scotland was published in London, while the official Votes for the Irish House of Commons and Scottish Estates were published in 1692 and 1693 respectively (Nelson and Seccombe 2002: 548–9; Harris 2007: 72). There were, of course, limits to how far information about Parliament would go: Michael Harris has shown that the House of Commons took an active role in controlling what information about the proceedings would be published (2007: 74). The 1695 lapse of the Licensing Act, which had been taken as a turning point for the freedom of the press, has more recently been problematised, especially in relation to newspapers: according to Caroline Nelson and Matthew Seccombe, newspapers after 1695 toed the line and avoided reportage that could be construed as seditious (Nelson and Seccombe 2002: 548). This research highlights that trying to find a definitive answer to the question of whether the press had an emancipatory or a propagandistic function is not a fruitful avenue of investigation. As Filippo De Vivo has adroitly summarised, communication ‘was itself part of the political system, it was an instrument of both power “and” criticism. The means and spaces of communication were the object of opposite claims by different social and political agents’ (De Vivo 2012: 136).

Media Hybridity The emphasis on the impact of news in the formation of public opinion has also led scholars to argue that print media displaced earlier forms

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press and politics in the seventeenth century 533 of communication. This narrative has recently been challenged vigorously with increased emphasis on media hybridity. The traditional narrative in the historiography of news, which claimed that print became the dominant technology of information, was enriched by studies on public opinion, which valorised print for its accessibility and capacity to reach a diverse audience (Raymond 1996: 4–5). A challenge to this position came from revisionist historians in the 1970s, who argued that for the study of politics, examining manuscript communications was more pertinent as they were more private and limited to members of the elite, who were closer to decision making. Post-­revisionist historians have tried to reclaim the significance of print for its impact on public opinion (Lake and Pincus 2007: 1–30). More recent approaches to political communication and the media have made more nuanced claims, arguing that we should conceive of the early modern system of communication as an integrated news universe. This is evident in works on the interdependence of early modern media. New work on newsletters has emphasised that, rather than being displaced by print, they continued to be significant throughout this period, but acted in concert with other media. Scholars such as Sabrina Baron, Alex Barber and Rachael Scarborough King have argued that manuscript newsletters had a more variegated audience than has sometimes been suggested: copies were made available in the shops of stationers and scriveners, as well as in coffee houses (which subscribed to specific newsletters), while the practices of ‘chain-­copying’ newsletters or disseminating their contents through correspondence and oral dissemination were very common (Baron 2001: 49–50; Barber 2013: 293–316). This was true in England as well as Scotland: Scottish country magnates combined in order to pay for the services of an Edinburgh news writer. He sent weekly newsletters, which were copied and circulated in the country. The city of Stirling understood the need to keep abreast of recent developments and tapped into diverse media: after 1665 it hired an Edinburgh news writer to send newsletters alongside printed news for the ‘information of the people’ (Couper 1908, I: 72, 74). Oral dissemination of news took place in the nexuses of information, such as the Royal Exchange, Parliament and the Court, but also in commercial establishments, such as booksellers’ shops and stalls, barbers’ shops and coffee houses (Loveman: 2015: 87–91; Atherton 1999b: 39; De Vivo 2019: 179). Coffee houses in England and Scotland in particular provided their patrons with a wide range of newspapers, newsletters and lively conversation of news (Pincus 1995; Fox 2020: 205).

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Media interdependence also related to the different uses that media were subjected to. For example, Noah Millstone has argued that the different media forms complemented one another as ‘each posed distinct problems that were resolved by other forms’. He emphasises how issues of inaccuracy (mistakes or partial information), incoherence (the fact that newspapers only presented fragments of news without a bigger picture) or significance (why was this piece of news important?) could be solved by slower publication such as overviews of sources (Millstone 2017: 183–6). The same has been argued about newsletters and pamphlets: single-­issue pamphlets provided more information and a clear context, which allowed readers to understand how a particular event fitted into patterns of interpretation (Pettegree 2014: 260). Baron has argued that newsletters could also provide information that was not available elsewhere, because they were sent to private individuals and could avoid censorship (Baron 2001: 50). Readers often tapped into different media in order to achieve a rounded understanding of the news (Millstone 2017: 189). Elements of intertextuality, of borrowing or copying material across media, is evident in this period. Printed newspapers relied on manuscript newsletters for much of their news, but the opposite was also true (Scarborough King 2016: 430). Newspaper editors received newsletters and other correspondence, which they incorporated into their publications. At the same time, newsletter writers often included news from newspapers, allowing a cross-­referencing of news. The example of Joseph Williamson, the Under-­secretary of State, is illuminating in understanding the interdependence of different media: Williamson supervised the Gazette and even forced its first editor, Henry Muddiman, to resign. When Muddiman started circulating his famous newsletters, Williamson set his agents to intercept them and sometimes passed the information on to the editors of the Gazette (Raymond 1998b: 119). Finally, he was also responsible for the distribution of a newsletter with the imprimatur ‘Whitehall’ sent from the Paper Office. The Gazette was also part of a manuscript exchange of news: Williamson sent the Gazette or a ‘private letter of intelligence’ to correspondents, and received news from them which could go to the Gazette or to ‘letters of intelligence’ (Glaisyer 2017: 261). In this interdependence, the role of newspaper publishers should not be underestimated. Edward Jones, who printed the London Gazette, also printed Extraordinaries, single publications that came out between issues of the Gazette and included news that the printer thought should not wait until the next newspaper issue (Glaisyer 2017: 264). Jones also published lists of Members of Parliament, of land forces and other

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press and politics in the seventeenth century 535 similar materials, and these publications were bound together with the Gazette by some readers. This multifarious media activity of the printer of the Gazette seems to follow the example of Théophraste Renaudot, who published La Gazette in France. Renaudot, alongside the newspaper, also published two series of single-­event news pamphlets, which provided more information about events presented in La Gazette (Ettinghausen 2016: 278). Finally, the fact that publishers of printed gazettes in the late seventeenth century also participated in the distribution of handwritten news, while their shops were often haunted by writers of newsletters, suggests an interplay between different media and an understanding that it was impossible (and unwelcome) to separate oral, manuscript and printed dissemination of news (Belo 2016: 376; Millstone 2017: 182).

News Diplomacy Newspapers could act as vehicles of diplomacy: state officials and diplomats took serious note of newspapers’ potential to reach different audiences abroad. Through news selection and editorial glosses, newspapers were envisaged as privileged sites of propaganda or polemic. This is evident if we examine the case of European audiences, but also Scottish and Irish ones. Research on news networks has shown the interconnectedness of European news, but it is also significant how newspapers were envisaged as communications to different audiences in continental Europe (Randall 2008b: 197–8). Jason Peacey (2017b) has shown how regimes were acutely aware of the significance of newspaper flows from Europe to England (and the reverse). Ambassadors sent back to England European gazettes as well as manuscript newsletters, so that the government could be kept apprised not only of developments on the Continent, but also of the ways in which English news was reported in European newspapers (Atherton 1999a: 202–6). Scholarly work on translations of British newspapers has provided intriguing insights about their employment as instruments of propaganda. Peacey has analysed the Nouvelles ordinaires de Londres, a ‘quasi-­official’ newspaper that presented British news in French between 1650 and 1660. The news was framed in such a way as to emphasise the ‘orderliness, stability and moderation’ of the Interregnum regimes. This news publication was ‘a covert form of diplomacy’, aimed at different audiences in Europe: the newspaper sought to project an image of strength that would undermine any hopes of a restoration entertained by royalist exiles in Europe while at

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the same time bolstering the respectability of the regime in European eyes (Peacey 2017b). A similar endeavour was the Restoration newspaper the Gazette de Londres (1666–1705), a translation of the London Gazette (Brownlees 2018: 14). Members of the political elite were acutely aware that what was translated (or omitted) in the Gazette de Londres could have profound significance for the image of England abroad. In a cross-­examination of the Gazette de Londres and the London Gazette, Nicholas Brownlees found examples of ‘ideologically motivated manipulation’, managing the news appropriately in order to promote the English regime (2018: 17, 24–8). This newspaper was seen as a way to communicate news from London to European powers, as can be seen from the example of the Tuscan envoy in London, who enclosed copies of the newspaper in his diplomatic correspondence to the Grand Duke of Tuscany (Brownlees 2018: 16). The circulation of British newspapers in Europe was more far-­ reaching than the examples of translations, of course. Newspapers and news pamphlets appeared in European cities, to garner European support for political viewpoints, or to circumvent censorship in Britain by being published in Europe, with the expectation that these texts would circulate in Britain. In the 1680s English Whigs used booksellers in the Low Countries in order to circulate news publications that promoted their version of political events, in particular the Whig newspaper Domestick Intelligence. This led to significant official concern and diplomats attempted to translate and circulate papers more friendly to the government (Peacey 2016: 424, 439). The flows of communication between England, Scotland and Ireland could also be manipulated for political purposes. Scotland and Ireland were disadvantaged by the hold of London on the print trade throughout the seventeenth century, but news from both places appeared in London newspapers. Even though Scottish pamphlets were used to great effect to agitate for resistance to the king before 1641, the Scottish newspaper trade took longer to set off (Raymond 2003: 161–201). The 1643 Scotch Mercury, communicating the Affairs of Scotland and the Northern Parts, and come over to accommodate the late Differences was published in London; it employed the Scottish persona as a vehicle to present an ‘outsider’s’ view on politics, but it was an English publication (the same is true for the Welch Mercury; see Brownlees 2009: 66–7). From 1647 the London Stationers’ Company used the services of Evan Tyler, an Edinburgh printer, in order to have access to the Scottish market. Tyler had the royal patent on printing in Scotland, which made his publications exempt from English patents. The serial news publications, which appeared in the Commonwealth era, were published

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press and politics in the seventeenth century 537 by the Stationers’ Company and were often reprints of London newsbooks. It seems that their intended audience was English soldiers in Scotland, but the dissemination of political news allowed debate in Scotland (Couper 1908, I: 49–58). The use of such publications as polemic by Parliament led Charles II, king of Scotland, to remove Tyler from the position of royal printer in 1650 and use James Brown’s press in Aberdeen for publications friendly to the royalist side (Spurlock 2011: 184). However, the development of Scottish newspapers changed the monopoly on political information: 1660 saw the publication of the ‘first Scottish periodical’, Mercurius Caledonius (31 December 1660–8 January 1661). This newspaper was published by Scottish booksellers, focused on Scottish affairs, and agitated fervently in favour of the house of Stuart (Couper 1908, I: 60). Irish newspapers in the seventeenth century were intimately connected to English or Protestant interests. Early newspapers such as the Irish Monthly Mercury (1649) were intended as vehicles of propaganda aimed at English audiences. Cromwellian papers, as Robert Munter argues, were ‘primitive forms of propaganda’, intended to justify the actions of the Cromwellian army in Ireland (1967: 17). The changing political scene in 1659 favoured the publication of An Account of the Chief Occurrences of Ireland, Together with some Particulars from England (1660), which formed part of a charm offensive aimed at persuading the Irish to support Charles II’s restoration to the throne. Even though more (often short-­lived) newspapers appeared from the 1660s, their expected audience was the ‘Protestant land-­owning group’; the newspapers participated in the war of words against Catholicism in the late seventeenth century. Indicative of this tendency is the 1690 Dublin Intelligence, which was sponsored by the Williamite regime and was aimed at rallying support among Protestants against James II (Munter 1967: 14). These attempts to mobilise support for the regime, however, were aimed at specific parts of the population. In them, the connection to England was more firmly established, but further drew the line between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland. Newspapers were intimately connected with politics throughout the seventeenth century as vehicles of political debate, propaganda and diplomacy. In order to examine their interplay in more depth, I will now turn to a case study from the end of the seventeenth century.

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Case Study 20: ‘A Hellish Conspiracy’: News Reportage of the 1696 Assassination Plot Lena Liapi On 14 February 1696, an assassination plot was uncovered against William III of England, Scotland and Ireland. This plot seemed to have been, if not planned, at least anticipated by James II and his ally, the French King Louis XIV. As soon as the plot became known, news started circulating that James II was in Calais with a French army, ready to invade the three kingdoms and restore himself to the throne. The fragility of the Williamite regime, exacerbated by a coinage crisis as well as fears that Dutch favours held sway over William, made this moment particularly dangerous (Pincus 2009: 438; Weil 2013: 248). Nonetheless, William and his regime capitalised on the aborted plot. In the immediate aftermath of the discovery of the assassination attempt, a general search throughout England, Scotland and Ireland was made, and scores of supporters of James II were indicted for participation in the plot. This event prompted (or forced) statements of support for the regime: the two Houses of Parliament signed an association stating not only that they were ready to defend William’s life, but also that he was the rightful king. This was a departure from the Glorious Revolution of 1688, at least in England: William had been proclaimed king de facto, rather than de jure (Vallance 2002: 15; in Scotland he was proclaimed king de jure in 1688). The association left the confines of Parliament and was imposed nationally. The failure of the assassination attempt strengthened William significantly. Most of the historiography on the 1696 plot has either analysed it as a conspiratorial event, o ­r – m ­ ore ­commonly – f­ocused on the political repercussions that followed its discovery. There has been markedly less interest in the newspaper coverage of the plot. This is due to a sense ­that – ­despite the lapse of the Licensing Act in ­1695 – n ­ ewspapers in the 1690s were ‘conventionally patriotic and carefully non-­partisan’ (Nelson and Seccombe 2002: 549). Mark Knights agrees with this assessment, and posits that pamphlets were more likely to be politically subversive than periodicals, because the latter were more vulnerable to government censorship (2005: 225). Thus, in Steve Pincus’s chapter on 1696, he mines newspapers for information, but shows less interest in examining how they reported events. Pincus’s statement that ‘newspaper reports, trial transcripts, and the published statements of the conspirators soon made public what the government already knew’ suggests that the role of newspapers was just to present matters of fact, and that any impact they had was in publicising events (Pincus 2009: 474). Similarly, in Tony Claydon’s William III and the Godly Revolution, which engages extensively with propaganda, there is little mention of newspapers (1996: 85–9).

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case study 20 : ‘a hellish conspiracy’ 539 To an extent, this is explained by the fact that newspapers in this period did not follow in the footsteps of the newsbooks of the 1640s, or the newspapers of the 1670s and early 1680s, which were viciously partisan. The English newspapers in 1696 did not differ significantly in their reportage. They all expressed horror at the assassination attempt, they emphasised that this was a European affair, and they followed both international and domestic developments: the search for conspirators, the associations, the European reaction. However, this does not mean they had no ideological or polemical agenda. A detailed analysis of the news reportage of the first two months after the discovery of the plot shows that even though newspapers did not engage in a war of words against one another, Whig newspapers (supporting William III) repeatedly stressed that this was France’s plot and that James II had acted dishonourably and against the interests of the three kingdoms. In order to make this point stick, such newspapers ventriloquised the French, piled on evidence to ensure that readers received the correct message, and framed this plot not only as part of a pan-­European struggle, but also as a confessional battle. Whig newspapers took the opportunity to present the conspiracy as widespread and sinister, focusing not only on the numbers of those accused, but also on the extent of France’s involvement. In particular, the Flying Post in early March had a very extensive account of the preparations for the invasion and the conspiracy by France. The editor, George Ridpath, emphasised this undertaking as clandestine, stating that ‘Never was so great an Undertaking carried with more Secrecy’ (Flying Post, 29 February 1696). More damningly, the Flying Post claimed that King James had signed the ‘Mortgage of the Crowns’ to the French king (also in the Whig Post Man, 29 February 1696). What this entailed was not specified, but given that Hull, Portsmouth and Plymouth would be offered to France as ‘Cautionary Towns’, the readers could assume that this was a way of mortgaging the three kingdoms to France. These were serious accusations: not only did they implicate France in this design, but they also suggested that King James was acting against the interests of the three kingdoms. This level of secrecy raises the question, of course, of how the newspaper received such a detailed account, a subject on which the editor is conveniently vague. The lack of any specified source for the above assertions was criticised soon after publication. On 7 March Ridpath was forced to defend his ‘news’ and his sources against Jacobite accusations that this was a ‘forgery’ (Flying Post, 7 March 1696); such accusations did not appear in newspapers, but they seem to have circulated orally or in manuscript. Ridpath stated that the same information about the conspiracy and the invasion could be found in ‘the Haerlem and Amsterdam, and other Foreign Gazettes, and Slips’. Ridpath uses foreign newspapers as guarantors of his information, reinforcing the significance of the flows of information from continental Europe. From a perusal

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of some of the French-­speaking newspapers in the Netherlands, this seems to have been the case, even if much of what was written was based on rumours about the conspiracy (Nouvelles extraordinaires de divers endroits, 6 March 1696; Nouvelles extraordinaires de divers endroits, 8 March 1696; Gazette de Rotterdam, 15 March 1696). However, the most damning of reports against King James (that he had mortgaged the three crowns and was willing to give three important English ports to the French) came from ‘particular Letters, of good Information’: anonymous letters cannot be proven to be actually credible. The editor here hopes that this information will persuade the ‘Impartial Reader’ that the newspaper has ‘good and early Intelligence’. The appeal to the ‘Impartial Reader’ as a judge suggests the opposite: this is a polemical publication, aimed not only at speaking to the readers who agreed with this viewpoint, but also mobilising them in defence of his story (see also Raymond 2014: 163). Since such claims were dropped from the next issues of the Flying Post, we can assume that the editor was forced to stop reporting what he could not corroborate. It is interesting to note that the Post Boy does not include any such mentions. Even though its editor accepted as true that there was a plan to invade England, there are no damning details against King James in it. The Post Boy was a Tory newspaper, which also reported extensively on the assassination, the French invasion and the search for conspirators. Nonetheless, it could not match the tone of Whig newspapers such as the Flying Post, the Protestant Mercury or the Post Man. For example, the Post Boy on 19 March reported news from Paris that ‘the French King will publish a Manifesto, to endeavour to convince the Princes of Europe, that neither he, nor the late King James knew nothing of the Conspiracy in England; but it is too well known he did, this being not the first of this nature that he has been concerned in’ (Post Boy, 19 March 1696). Comparing this to the bombastic reportage of the Flying Post of the same date, we can see that Ridpath is not satisfied with just dismissing the French king’s manifesto. He piles on all possible information: he argues that the confederate princes were also certain of Louis XIV’s culpability; that a medal was struck in France celebrating the assassination; that members of James II’s retinue were extremely disconcerted when news of the assassination’s failure arrived; that the French were expecting William’s death to rob the Duke of Savoy of his support; and even the minor detail that James II’s ‘Chancellor had taken a great quantity of Wax with him to Seal Pardons in England; for which no conjecture can be made, but that it was privately to Indemnify the Villanous [sic] Assassins’ (Flying Post, 19 March 1696). This passage is meant to persuade through the accumulation of damning evidence. The editor of the Post Man followed a very similar approach, answering ‘some Jacobites’ who accused the newspaper of ‘charging the French King with being privy to that hellish design’. He also presents information suggesting that Louis XIV knew about the

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case study 20 : ‘a hellish conspiracy’ 541 plot, and concludes that the Jacobites will ‘never persuade any sensible man’ that the French king was unaware of the assassination plot (Post Man and the Historical Account, 14 March 1696). Another difference in tone can be seen in the reporting of the trial and execution of the main conspirators, Charnock, King and Keys. The bone of contention in their confessions, both at the trial and at their execution, was whether James II had authorised the assassination and intended to invade England, Ireland and Scotland. The conspirators had asked for the publication of their final words; a pamphlet was published immediately, stressing that James II had no knowledge of the assassination (A True Copy of the Papers Delivered by Mr Rob. Chernocke, Mr Ed. King, Mr. Th. Key, 1696). Newspapers set out to counter this narrative, but not with the same vehemence. The Post Boy stated that ‘I hear that they owned the Crime for which they died, but seemed to excuse the late King James as to his knowledge of it, and they apper’d sorry for the heinousness of the Design’ (Post Boy, 19 March 1696). The Flying Post was not satisfied with this, and claimed that the conspirators had ‘prevaricated’. Even though the editor cannot ignore what the prisoners said, he adds that ‘the World is pretty well satisfied what the Principles of the Papists are in that respect’, rehashing the common accusation against Catholics (and Jesuits specifically) that they always equivocated when faced with interrogation, in order to hide their secrets (Flying Post, 21 March 1696). Throughout, Whig newspapers sought to mobilise support and provide the necessary arguments against James II and France. There was political capital to be gained and an outside and inside enemy to be addressed and verbally vanquished. Whig newspapers used another method to stress French complicity in the plot: they reported news from France in the first person, implying that it was coming from insiders in the Court. This was especially the case with news of the response from the French Court to the news of the failed assassination. For example, the Post Man’s news from Paris claimed that even though the Court knew about the aborted plot, they kept everything secret from the public. The report also intimated that this enterprise ‘will make us the laughing stock of our Enemies, and tarnish our reputation in the Newtral Courts of Europe’ (The Post Man and the Historical Account, 12 March 1696). The Whig newspaper Protestant Mercury, which first appeared on 9 March 1696, ventriloquised the French response in two successive issues (see Morison 1931: 14). The news from Paris on 13 March reported here claimed that King James’s ‘pretended Invasion upon England, has only served to open the Eyes of our Enemies, and make them take those measures, which otherwise they might perhaps never have thought of’ (The Protestant Mercury, Occurrences Foreign and Domestick, 13 March 1696). On 16 March the same feeling of surprise is evident from Paris: ‘tho’ that great Blow on which we so much depended, is thereby prevented, yet we have this Consolation, that we perceive there are

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still many Malecontents in that Kingdom, who will still be ready to assist us on any occasion’. In these issues, not only is France shown to be complicit, but the continued threat from Jacobites is emphasised (The Protestant Mercury, Occurrences Foreign and Domestick, 16 March 1696; see also The Post Man and the Historical Account, 12 March 1696). The Flying Post was again more graphic. In its reportage of the news from Paris, it claimed that: Our [the French] Court is Thunderstruck at the News they receiv’d by the three last Posts from England; And the King sent for the Foreign Ministers, and declared, He had no knowledge of the Assassination, and would Publish a Manifesto thereof to the World; but Granvalle having declared at his Death, that he had Orders for the like Assassination from the Chief Ministers of our Court, and the King himself having taken the Sacrament to observe the Peace with Spain, and yet broke it speedily after, his asseveration finds little Credit. (Flying Post, 17 March 1696) The language employed here, and especially the use of the first person, gives the impression that this presented the opinion of the French Court, even when this was unlikely. The editor of the Flying Post felt the need to add his own comments, reminding readers of a previous assassination attempt, to discredit King Louis’s assertions. The ease with which a passage starting with ‘Our Court’ moves to editorial comment casts doubt on the editor’s claim that this is a faithful description of French statements. Even if these comments were not the editor’s, but from another European newspaper, the English editor chose to include them and preface them as news from Paris. Joad Raymond has argued that ‘news remains strikingly intact’ in translation to other countries, but this seems unlikely in this case (Raymond 2014: 159). The use of the first person implies that these are verbatim translations of French accounts, but the intended message is to implicate the French Court in the invasion and the assassination. The editor of the Post Man also used the tactic of presenting an abstract from the Paris Gazette of 24 March, which ended, ‘the pretence of a Conspiracy has been made use of to insert in a publick Act part of the Oath, which was rejected in the examination of the Council of Trade’. The editor glosses this abstract by stating that the denial of the French king is ‘a new strong presumption that the Councill of France was concerned in the design of murthering the King’ (The Post Man and the Historical Account, 24 March 1696). This was a call to arms intended for a domestic audience, but not restricted to it. Bolstering the connection between the French Court and the assassination attempt, this kind of reportage aimed at showing that this was part of a pan-­ European struggle against France. Thus, the fallout from the plot was framed

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case study 20 : ‘a hellish conspiracy’ 543 as a pan-­European concern. Whig newspapers gleefully reported the thanksgiving celebrations that took place in various countries at the discovery of the plot against William (see The Flying Post, 17 March 1696). In addition, the horrified reaction of European courts was vividly presented. The news from Copenhagen read: ‘Every body cries shame on them [the French], for their horrid Design on King William’s Life; and the French Nation hath thereby incurr’d a General Odium; for all Men are of Opinion, that they formented the same [the ‘horrid design on King William’s Life’] (The Post Man and the Historical Account, 28 March 1696). Newspapers also anticipated the favourable reactions of others: the Protestant Mercury reported from the Hague that the French had hoped for great gains, but these new Discoveries of the baseness of France, will undoubtedly cement the Alliance against her: And the Confederate Princes, in just abhorrence of such Villany, seem resolved to act with greater Vigour [. . .] nor will the French Kings intended Manifesto have any influence upon them: And it is not to be doubted b ­ ut . . . t­hat they will now bring vengeance against the French King. (The Protestant Mercury, Occurrences Foreign and Domestick, 20 March 1696) The mention of the arrests of conspirators or the associations signed in Scotland and Ireland suggested that this concerned the three kingdoms (Post Boy, 12 March 1696; Post Boy, 14 March 1696; Flying Post, 21 March 1696). Newspapers emphasised the extent of Scottish preparations against invasion and attempted to counter any rumours that there would be an insurrection in support of the Stuarts: reports reassured readers that the Scottish government had ‘10000 men in Arms, ready to march upon the first notice of the Landing of an Enemy’ and that ‘there is no News of any Invasion or Insurrection from that Country as some give out’ (Flying Post, 5 March 1696; Flying Post, 3 March 1696; see also Flying Post, 28 March 1696, which includes an address by the Privy Council of Scotland and one by the city of Edinburgh celebrating the failure of the plot). In order to solidify this ‘us and them’ mentality, such newspapers also invoked the spectre of Catholic conspiracy. This runs counter to Steve Pincus’s claim that Williamites did not attempt to frame the assassination plot in confessional terms, due to an understanding of its ‘multiconfessional nature’ (Pincus 2009: 454). The main Whig newspapers were vociferous against Catholics and their involvement in the assassination plot and invasion. The Flying Post claimed ‘That there was scarcely a Religious Foundation in and about Paris but had ventured more or less [money] in this Expedition’ with particularly sinister intentions: according to its reports, the College of Jesuits intended to send some of their members along with James II to England to steer him in the ‘right’

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direction (Flying Post, 7 March 1696). Even more threateningly for Protestants, after the successful invasion, the Jesuits planned to ‘erect a Foundation for their Society’ in Chelsea College ‘that they might be near to the King, to advise with in his important Affairs’ (Flying Post, 7 March 1696). The Post Man found a more subtle way to highlight that this was a Catholic plot, reporting that, upon search, a wagon inbound for London was found carrying ‘a great Box of Ivory and Wooden Crucifixes, and other Popish Trinkets, that were coming to the first Market, if the Intended Assassination had taken effect’ (The Post Man and the Historical Account, 28 March 1696). The Protestant Mercury, unsurprisingly, made a direct attack against Catholics, using the example of the three conspirators. It claimed that the Church of Rome had often stooped to ‘consecrat[ing] Daggers, Guns, &c. to Murder those she hates’ and to proclaiming such assassins ‘pious Martyr[s]’. In a stab against Protestant Jacobites, the newspaper added that ‘for those who pretend to be Protestants, whose Religion declaims and abhors all such ­Practices . . . ­to promote the ends of Papists, and at once to destroy their Religion, and enslave their Country and their Posterity is unaccountable’ (The Protestant Mercury, Occurrences Foreign and Domestick, 18 March 1696). The next issue compared this assassination plot with the St Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, in order to remind readers not only of the readiness of Catholics to kill their own compatriots, but also of the perfidy of French kings: even though the King of France in 1572 was also styled ‘the most Christian’ king, he was willing to kill his Protestant subjects. The implication here is evident: inviting France to invade England could only result in the destruction of the Protestant religion and the death of scores of Protestants. The editor states this plainly: And now I would ask our English Jacobites, who are so eager to bring in the French upon us, what is it they can hope for from France? and whether she will be an indulgent Step-­mother, that hath not, nor does not at this instant spare the Sons of her own Bowels who are Protestants? (The Protestant Mercury, Occurrences Foreign and Domestick, 20 March 1696) There was acknowledgement here that not all Jacobites were Catholics, but this for the editor is even more damning, because they are willing to allow a second massacre of Protestants. In conclusion, newspapers were a site of public debate in 1696, just not a self-­contained one. Even though Jacobite arguments were presented in other media, newspapers responded to their arguments and attempted to counter their assertions. Whig newspapers were partisan and can be seen as part of an ‘aggressive campaign by Whigs to marginalise a country opposition and to expel Tories from positions of influence’ (Weil 2013: 256). They took the opportunity to vilify James II, France and Catholicism in order to bolster

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case study 20 : ‘a hellish conspiracy’ 545 the position of William III and his Whig government. Such newspapers used a combination of reporting that ventriloquised the French and presented the favourable reactions of others, while editorial commentary and references to the past constructed an enemy poised to strike and destroy the three kingdoms’ autonomy and religion. Even unsubstantiated rumours were presented as credible. Contrasting this to the more muted reportage from the Tory Post Boy reinforces this conclusion. Whig newspapers were ‘patriotic’ only to the extent that they reframed patriotism, arguing that it meant supporting the Williamite regime and excluding Catholics from the body politic. This, in itself, was a highly ­political – a ­ nd p ­ artisan – a ­ ct. Finally, the reportage of the 1696 plot suggests the significance of flows of information from Europe but also the ways in which newspapers could be employed as vehicles of diplomacy. Whig newspapers used reports from European newspapers in creative ways: news from France was maliciously reported, while news from other European cities was employed to show how their positions aligned with the British Crown. In doing so, newspapers presented a united European front against France and agitated in favour of punishing the French for their actions. British newspapers were embedded in the European flows of communication and sought to make ripples.

Chapter Twenty-­four

RELIGION AND THE SEVENTEENTH-­CENTURY PRESS Katie McKeogh and Sarah Ward Clavier

Introduction Religious belief was the fulcrum of individual and collective life in early modern society. The news was one phenomenon through which the collective and the individual were brought into contact with each other, and it follows that the influence of religion should be detectable in it. Scholars including Andrew Pettegree and Joad Raymond have attempted to define ‘news’, and by drawing on research from a variety of disciplines they have come up with different answers (Pettegree 2014; Raymond and Moxham 2016). We have found Raymond’s definition of the newspaper to be a helpful guide: it is ‘defined by seriality, precise periodicity, physical continuity, consecutive numbering and a stable title’ (Raymond 2003: 107). The periodical press was chiefly, though not exclusively, an instrument of news. The news was polyvocal, coming to consumers in myriad forms, and to consider the periodical press as though it existed in a vacuum would misrepresent it. Not all periodicals fell into the genre of news. Between the lapse of the 1662 Licensing Act in 1679 and its reinstatement in 1685, for example, ninety-­two periodical titles were published in London. Of these, Susannah Randall has estimated that seventy-­six can be termed ‘unofficial newspapers’ (2008: 45). Publications outside the newspaper genre included scholarly works such as Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, book trade notices such as Catalogue of books printed/ continued and the more literary Lucian, a Dialogue (S. Randall 2008: 49–50). Religion is vast and unwieldy. Its tendrils are so numerous and so extensive that they can be difficult to see, much less to disentangle. It can encompass such varied aspects as doctrine, practice, confessional 546

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religion and the seventeenth-­c entury press 547 differences, lay and ecclesiastical divisions, controversies, regional variation and much more. It is not a topic that can easily be confined to its own discrete sphere. In the early modern period religion was almost always entangled, for example, with politics and social or economic differences. In early modern Britain there were few areas of life, both for the state and the individual person, in which religion was not relevant. The entanglement of religion with all areas of life is visible when examining religion and the periodical press. Religion pervaded early modern news media: its content, censors, audiences, writers, printers and publishers. Indeed, religious books have long been acknowledged as constituting the largest category in British publishing in the early modern period. Sermons on their own represented 14 per cent of the total output of London stationers in the period 1614–18 (Rigney 2011: 204). Religion is similarly ever-­present in the early modern periodical press and its publishing environment. Newspapers and periodicals described events, individuals and policies that related to religion, from the actions of Protestant radicals or fears of Catholic plots to James II’s attempts at religious toleration. These descriptions were often strongly affected by the confessional position of the writer, publisher and audience. Outside the period 1642–60 the Church was involved in the licensing and censorship of the press, and clergymen themselves were both the authors and subject of news items. Anti-­Catholicism was a prominent trope in the early modern periodical press, whether the result of proto-­nationalist politicking or domestic fears about the reintroduction of popery. This short chapter will draw out of this complex morass some key themes. After first exploring the historiography of religion and the news, it will consider the range of sources available to scholars. Next, we explore four important thematic areas of news content, before ending with a brief case study on popery and the news.

Historians, Religion and the News Scholarly work on religion and the early modern periodical press in Britain and Ireland is both wide-­ranging and highly specialised. There have, as yet, been no monographs or even edited collections specifically focused on the topic in its widest sense. In many instances, news media are used as evidence in discussions about religion, but the news itself is not explored in any depth. In others, the periodical press is discussed in some depth but with only passing reference to religion (Tubb 2004). In the vast historiography relating to British Catholicism

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Figure 24.1  Due to the periodical’s success, in the ‘Advertisement’ the editor of the Pacquet of Advice from Rome of 23 December 1678 informs readers of a change in the day of publication (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin)

in the early modern period, for example, there has been to date minimal research relating to Catholicism and the n ­ ews – ­either works by Catholics, or their representation in the press. Similarly, the contested depictions of Interregnum episcopalianism in the press have also been neglected. Confessional audiences have occasionally been discussed in relation to particular individuals or works, but there have been no systematic studies on this topic. Even content relating to religion in newsletters, newsbooks and later newspapers has received minimal attention. There are clearly numerous opportunities for studies in this area. Historians, literary scholars and linguists have tended to cluster around specific areas or points in time when religion and news interacted intensely in the period 1640–1700. Several scholars have examined the interaction between the Church of England and the censorship of news and other print media. Chelsea Reutke has looked at Catholic print and the 1662 Licensing Act, drawing attention to how the

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religion and the seventeenth-­c entury press 549 established Church was explicitly linked with regulation. The Bishop of London, together with the Stationers’ Company and the Surveyor of the Press, regulated publications (Reutke 2020: 290). Moreover, concern about the potential for the press to seed religious heterodoxy was evident in the Licensing Act, which ‘specifically forbade the printing of any matter “contrary t­ o . . . ­the doctrine or discipline of the Church of England” and, among other measures, re-­established a system of compulsory pre-­publication licensing, modelled on that of the Star Chamber ordinance of 1637’ (Love 2004). Anthony Milton examined the use of licensing and censorship to control ideas of religious orthodoxy in the early Stuart period. For all the interest in controlling the presses, he makes a convincing case for a subtler approach. He suggests that ‘censorship’ may itself be misleading, that debates over its existence have left scholars asking the wrong questions. Instead, as the government sought to define the true Church and how it should operate, ‘the notion of “censorship” was itself a weapon in the controversies of the period’ (Milton 1998: 650). Mary Morrissey’s work on chaplains and media control confirms Milton’s findings. She shows how domestic chaplains of the Bishop of London were deeply involved in the licensing and censorship of printed material before the lapse in the licensing process when Star Chamber was abolished by the Long Parliament in 1641 (Morrissey 2013: 64–82). Daniel Reed has written of the strong ties between the Church, Crown and press in the north of England after the Restoration, as well as of the depiction of the clergy in the news and the consumption of the news by the clergy. He argues that the Church was deeply involved in press control (Reed 2018: 77–9). There are chronological periods when it is particularly difficult to avoid an examination of religion and the news. One such period covers 1640–60, from the febrile atmosphere before the outbreak of the First Civil War (1642–46), through the religious controversies and disputes of the Interregnum, to the Restoration in 1660. The periodical press in England initially emerged from the religious and political arguments that saw the people of England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland forced to take sides between their king and the Parliament (Raymond 1996: 80–1). Much as the roots of cheap print lay in the explosion of religious controversy in the Lutheran Reformation, therefore, the dawning of the periodical in Britain and Ireland also emerged from a time of intense religious and political disputation (Pettegree 2014: 67–75). Some individual writers in this period have received scholarly attention. One example is the Laudian clergyman and controversialist Peter Heylyn, whose contribution to royalist newsbooks is examined by

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Anthony Milton (Milton 2007: 122–33). Marcus Nevitt has revealed the interactions of parliamentarian women with royalist newsbooks in writing about Katherine Chidley and Elizabeth Alkin. He examines their interactions with the press and the depiction of parliamentarian women in it. Religious attitudes, whether anti-­popish or pro-­radical, play some part in this (Nevitt 1999: 84–108). Even scurrilous royalist ballads and libels contained religious sentiment, often anti-­Puritan accusations of religious and moral hypocrisy (Ward Clavier 2018; McElligott 2004b). The pulpit had long been a medium for the transfer of news, as had the church as a focus of community life. Lloyd Bowen has examined clerical involvement in the promulgation of the king’s message via proclamations, declarations and state prayers from the pulpit from 1639 to the outbreak of hostilities in 1642, and it is clear that the king used proclamations effectively as a form of news publication during the war (Bowen 2013: 297–319; Kyle 2015: 771–87). After 1641 sermons frequently appeared in newsbooks and other news publications. As a result, newsworthy sermons have been discussed by literary scholars and theologians, as well as historians of print and politics. Joad Raymond considered the ‘pulpit and the press’ as an intrinsic part of the development of the newsbook from 1641, explaining the use to which sermons were put in the fight for hearts and minds in the early 1640s (Raymond 1996: 188–93). Bernard Capp mentions the use of printed sermons as part of the ‘culture wars’ of the 1650s, including the encouragement by the parliaments of the Commonwealth and Protectorate to print supportive godly sermons to counteract morally malignant influences elsewhere (Capp 2012: 64–5). Tom Webster’s survey chapter in the Oxford Handbook of the Early Modern Sermon examines the parliamentary Fast sermons of 1641–50 as well as the market for controversial works on Church government (Webster 2011). Historians such as Jason Peacey, Joad Raymond, R. Scott Spurlock and Nicole Greenspan have all considered the substantial increase and diversification in print culture at this point in time (Peacey 2013; Raymond 1996; Spurlock 2011; Greenspan [2012] 2016). Peacey and Greenspan have emphasised the propaganda value of print, and that propaganda value clearly included religious as well as political judgements. Religious heterodoxy in particular was a favoured subject for pamphleteers and newsmongers. This is true of both royalist Civil War pamphleteers and more moderate Presbyterian or Independent writers in the 1650s. Sects such as the Quakers and Ranters were depicted as evidence that the world was being ‘turned upside down’,

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religion and the seventeenth-­c entury press 551 and scholars have used news material in assessing their depiction and impact. Kathryn Gucer has explored pamphlets representing the Ranters, showing that many of the anti-­Ranter polemicists were Presbyterians, while some were royalists (Gucer 2000). Similarly, Laurent Curelly has written of the representation of Diggers and Ranters in contemporary newspapers. He argues that that their depiction demonstrates the fear and anxiety inspired by such groups, as well as a desire to shape public ­opinion – ­either in favour of, or in opposition to, heterodox groups and those in government (Curelly 2019).

Sources The principal difficulty in outlining the available source material relevant to any study of religion and the periodical press is similar to that of discussing its historiography: it is scattered, wide-­ranging and diverse in form. As a result, the material discussed below is clearly indicative rather than comprehensive. One obvious starting point is the extant runs of printed newsbooks, newspapers, periodicals and pamphlets. Many of these are now digitised and available via online databases such as Early English Books Online. Others, including early regional publications, are situated in regional and local record offices and in private collections. Large manuscript newsletter collections can be used to further expand the evidential base. There are significant examples of these collections in the British Library, the Bodleian Library and, again, in local and regional offices in the archives of noble and gentry families. Although manuscript newsletters are different in form and operation to periodical news, they do share some similarities, and their production, content and reception reveal many commonalities and interactions. These can be material, including print transfer, or textual, revealing titles and contents of popular news publications. News items and publications were discussed in personal letters, and so personal correspondence can also be extremely useful, particularly where a correspondent’s interest in news was particularly intense, or when they had a role in licensing the press, such as Dr John Cosin. Personal letters also indicate religious position and attitudes, and can occasionally give a sense of the reception of particular news items or publications. Diarists, such as Ralph Josselin and Philip Henry, or more famous examples such as Samuel Pepys or John Evelyn, could furnish rich individual studies. The Entring Book of Roger Morrice, somewhat more of a chronicle than a diary, is another excellent potential source, as is the work of Nehemiah Wallington and Narcissus

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Luttrell. These (and other unpublished diaries and compendia) can be studied for evidence of the reception of religious news content. Royal proclamations, parliamentary journals such as that of Sir Simonds D’Ewes, the Journals of the House of Commons, and records of deliberations by parliamentary committees are also useful as evidence of official attitudes to press reports of religious news.

Content Religion in all its rich and varied forms featured frequently in the periodical press. There were items of foreign news that had strong religious inflections. These included, for example, the Thirty Years’ War, fears about the expansion of the Ottoman Empire and the influence of Islam, or the progress of Catholic powers. Domestically, religion was obviously a key theme from the opening of the Long Parliament in November 1640. It featured in parliamentary newsbooks from the first page of the first domestic example. The key religious issues covered in that first ­issue – ­episcopacy, the attitudes of non-­Puritan clergy and ­Catholicism – ­appeared repeatedly in this and similar periodicals throughout the Civil War. In the official government newspaper, the London Gazette, first published as the Oxford Gazette in 1665, there was no mention of serious religio-­political crises such as the Popish Plot (1678–81) or the Exclusion Crisis (1679–81), but royal proclamations on the subject did appear. Between the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1679 and the suppression of unlicensed newspapers in 1683 controversial religious news did appear, particularly in relation to the Exclusion Crisis (Childs 1987). Fears of a Catholic conspiracy and of the accession of a Catholic monarch provided some of the fuel for Whig printers and politicians, while their Tory opponents opposed exclusion in their own organs, for example Roger L’Estrange’s The Observator in Question and Answer, which ran from 1681 to 1687 (Slauter 2015: 19–46). Unlicensed newspapers appeared briefly again after James II fled in 1688, but were quickly restricted by William and Mary in 1689. As with foreign news, in much of this material religion was inseparably connected to politics, and the actual religious content frequently limited to crude anti-­ popery or anti-­sectarian sentiment, depending on the publisher, period and organ. The periodical press also contained many seemingly incidental references to religion, such as the appearance of providential explanations for deliverance from disaster or for judgement on the unrighteous. In January 1642, for example, there was an account from Ireland of how

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religion and the seventeenth-­c entury press 553 people in Dublin had been ‘miraculously’ preserved from the rebels (Diurnall Occurrances, 2–10 January 1642, 6). These references were highly evident in periodicals published during the First Civil War, but continued to be a frequent feature after that point. The following sections will briefly discuss several key themes in news content, such as religion in foreign news, in parliamentary periodicals, anti-­popery and anti-­sectarianism during the Restoration and religion in official publications.

Foreign News The publication of the first serialised news in the early 1620s was driven by foreign events. Jayne Boys demonstrated that foreign news was published and disseminated throughout England from October 1622 onwards, thanks initially to the work of a ‘syndicate of five publishers’, and may be organised into three particularly prominent themes: diplomatic, military and mercantile (Boys 2011: 8, 61). There were Catholic and Protestant emigrés and travellers across the Low Countries, France and Spain from each of the three kingdoms. Among them were students, soldiers, intelligencers and reluctant exiles, many of whom sought a place where they could practise their faith without fear of molestation while maintaining links with their homeland. National and even regional identities were certainly important, therefore, and British consumers of news were naturally invested in military events involving those close to them. Readers also understood that events on foreign soil might eventually play out on British shores. Throughout the Thirty Years’ War, encroaching Catholic powers fed Protestant fears, generating an appetite for news of the conflict (Boys 2011: 7). Regulation of the news fluctuated with diplomatic pressures, and was used by successive governments to try to sway the public in support of foreign policy (Raymond 2011: 383). A Protestant narrative was ‘vital at the time to muster and retain support for resistance to the Habsburgs’, and the oral and manuscript transmission of news, together with print, fuelled popular anti-­ popery (Boys 2011: 4). The siege of Vienna by the Ottomans in July 1683 received extensive coverage in the London Gazette despite press restrictions (Ingram 2014: 60–1), as readers clamoured for information about the Turks, a people synonymous with heresy. The audience for foreign news across the three kingdoms was itself embroiled in continental conflict, whatever the formal diplomatic status of the Crown. The peace with Spain notwithstanding, English, Welsh and Scottish soldiers enlisted in Protestant armies such as that of Sweden,

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and Catholics, largely from Ireland, fought under the Habsburg flag (Boys 2011: 8, 224–5). The news was often foreign in both content and derivation. Translations were typical, especially of German and Dutch material, with publishers drawing on multiple sources (see Barker 2013). While the news was a commercial phenomenon, it was shaped by the priorities and influences of the people involved, such that readers could find a range of subjects and points of view represented. The appetite for news from abroad grew partly out of the religious impulse that was the fulcrum of an individual and collective worldview. Popular anxieties about creeping popery endured throughout the seventeenth century, but worsened as Charles pursued a pro-­Spanish course, and coalesced around his Catholic queen, Henrietta Maria, and her circle. Yet the historiography of English Catholicism has established that there was a sizeable audience for news from the Catholic perspective throughout England, Wales, Scotland and Ireland. The press did not always march to a Protestant beat, and a quiet Catholic cross-­rhythm can be identified. Protestants read Catholic works, out of curiosity as well as ­strategy – i­n theological debates it helped to know what one’s interlocutor was r­ eading – a­ nd vice versa. Indeed, it would be counterintuitive to draw crude generalisations about reception along confessional lines. In his study of the Catholic gentleman William Blundell, Geoff Baker demonstrated that Blundell read with a sharply critical eye, and did not spare his coreligionists (Baker 2010: 120–6). There is no reason to think that Blundell was singular in his selective and, at times, misrepresentative reading and commonplacing of the news and other genres; his notes on an issue of the Monthly Mercury misconstrued one article as ‘unspeakably bitter against the French King’ (Baker 2010: 125). During the Popish Plot issues of the Observator published in May 1683 ‘both invoked and augmented the currency of Catholic royalist motifs’ to promote the support lent by Catholics of both high and low status to Charles II at the battle of Worcester, and to discredit Titus Oates. At the helm, Roger L’Estrange ‘­took . . . ­ideas of literary exemplarity, and positive images of the Catholic to new heights, advancing an agenda that was both “Tory reaction” and “pro-­ Catholic”’ (Packham 2014: 67).

Parliamentary Proceedings Religion formed a core part of parliamentary business from the very beginning of the Long Parliament, which convened on 3 November 1640. Concerns about Laudian ‘innovations’ and the power and role

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religion and the seventeenth-­c entury press 555 of bishops were loudly expressed. Puritan MPs and their external supporters desired further Reformation, and argued that the Church of England was becoming increasingly popish under the influence of Charles’s advisers and his queen. News reports echoed this. They expressed fears of Catholics and identified actions to be taken against Catholic recusants, due to there having been ‘a great occasion of the Rebellion in Ireland and of the warrs that followed thereupon’ (Diurnall Occurrances, 2–10 January 1642, 5). Proposed actions included disabling them from bearing any office, depriving them of weapons and moving them to remote places in the countryside, so that ‘we may be the better able to bridle their insolencies, especially in these cumbustious times’ (Continuation of the true diurnall, 21–28 March 1642, 18). These newsbooks also reported legislation relating to religious affairs. That of 30 May–6 June 1642, for example, described bills against ‘scandalous ministers’ and pluralities, as well as that to set up an Assembly of Divines (and its potential personnel) (Diurnall Occurrances, 30 May–6 June 1642, sig. A2). Another newsbook advertised the impending removal of those ‘addicted to Popery or Superstitious Ceremonies’, as well as ‘Drunkards, Blasphemers, and other lascivious Persons’ (Continuation of the true diurnall, 21–28 March 1642, 19). Added to this were local concerns about particular ministers, who were named and their treatment in Parliament described. These were to form the main themes of the religious content of parliamentary periodicals from 1641. The first English news periodical to concentrate on domestic affairs reported on parliamentary proceedings. It was entitled The heads of severall proceedings in this present Parliament and was dated 29 November 1641. Many other parliamentary periodicals were to follow, often short-­lived, but all including information about events in and around the Houses of Parliament. By the first week of December 1645 fourteen weekly titles were being published, and only two offered no comment on parliamentary affairs (Peacey 2014: 433). The publication of parliamentary news from 1641 was a novelty, and following the Restoration in 1660 it did not become commonplace in Britain until the late eighteenth century. Prior to this point the secrecy of parliamentary proceedings was closely guarded, and there was strong opposition to the publication of debates. Politicians believed that such information should only be available to the initiated, and that the ‘mysteries of state’ should stay mysterious. As Jason Peacey has demonstrated, these novel reports about formal parliamentary proceedings ‘quickly became the most important source of news from Westminster’ (2007: 2–4).

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These publications included the actions of the ‘mob’ as well as the deliberations and votes of MPs and Lords inside the Parliament buildings. The future of the episcopacy provides one example of this coverage. In The heads of severall proceedings mention is made on the first page of a protest in the House by ‘foure men brought before them for making a hubbub in the Hall, crying downe Antichrist and the Bishops’ and threatening a larger mob the next day (Heads of severall proceedings, 1641, sig. A2). The same edition reported a protest outside the Commons by ‘many hundred of Cittizens’ in favour of suppressing episcopacy, calling bishops ‘limbes of Antichrist’ and anti-­ Christian (Heads of severall proceedings, 1641, 3). Episcopacy became a significant preoccupation of parliamentary reporting as well as of Parliament itself. Given that at least some of the newspaper reports had implicit sanction from Parliament, there is a strong likelihood that the reporting acted as a further public mouthpiece for those MPs who increasingly sought further religious reformation in the Church of England. Diurnall Occurrances reported on a petition of the twelve imprisoned bishops and the parliamentary response to it, which dismissed the bishops’ arguments due to their alleged treatment of ‘many poor Ministers’ (Diurnall Occurrances, 29 November 1641, sig. A2, pp. 3, 5). This example demonstrates the frequent interaction between manuscript, periodicals and ­print – ­the petition itself, and the parliamentary response to it, were also printed and formed part of the public conversation in the weeks and months before the outbreak of the Civil War (The Petition and Protestation of twelve Bishops, 1642; The Twelve Bishops called to the Parliament, 1642).

National and Regional News News of the Thirty Years War was not only of interest to Londoners. During the Restoration, information about the progress of the war with the Dutch was ‘widely desired and ubiquitously available throughout the three kingdoms, and among a wide variety of social strata’, such that gentlemen in Lancashire and Lincolnshire were sufficiently well-­ informed to be able to make ‘extremely accurate lists’ of English naval minutiae (Pincus 1996: 276–7). Rural and metropolitan residents had access to newspapers, even if their experiences of news culture were not homogeneous (Peacey 2015: 284). News of foreign events was transmitted far beyond London, percolating among the patrons of Dublin coffee houses (Pincus 1997: 280) and in any forum where people met. The fledgling periodical press in Ireland had English roots. William Bladen, born in Derbyshire and formerly of the Stationers’ Company

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religion and the seventeenth-­c entury press 557 in London, settled in Dublin and subsequently bought the Company’s Irish privilege for £2,600 in 1638 (Munter 1967: 4). Newspapers in Ireland had a slow, spluttering genesis, and under ­Bladen – ­still a government man, though his allegiances would swing to and fro – ‘Dublin printing remained, in entrepreneurial terms, distinctly conservative’ in the 1640s and 1650s (Rankin 2017: 466). Bladen supplied the London presses with Irish news, but proved recalcitrant about straying beyond the strictures of his patent to produce domestic news for the Irish market. Use of print beyond the periodical press was more partisan, with ‘Royalists, Catholic Confederates, Parliamentarians’ all clamouring ‘to use print not only as an index of authority, but also as a propaganda weapon’ (Rankin 2017: 465). Burgeoning literary publications appeared in the late seventeenth century, but these served Protestants better than Catholics, who, ‘always marginalised, had been explicitly and actively excluded from the trade’ by a requirement to swear the Oath of Allegiance from 1691 (Rankin 2017: 473). They had, however, seized upon the window of opportunity occasioned by James II’s Catholic toleration. Of the twenty-­five publications for which the Catholic printer James Malone was responsible, two were periodicals: the Dublin Gazette and, in 1689, a broadsheet hoax claiming to be a weekly newspaper, The abhorrence, or, Protestant observations in Dublin, upon the principles and practices of the Protestants at London (Rankin 2017: 473–4). North of the border, the Interregnum heralded the first regular, multi-­issue newspapers. English newspapers did not simply report for the benefit of English readers, and the periodical press could be a significant participant in religious politics in Scotland. In January 1652, for example, Mercurius Politicus reported on the case of Alexander Irvine. Irvine was found guilty of harbouring a Jesuit priest, but wished to evade punishment. When summoned by the Aberdeen presbytery, he sought the aid of General George Monck. Irvine gambled that he could use Monck’s dislike for the presbytery’s heavy-­handedness to win his intercession. It paid off, and Monck, who ‘had no patience with the inquisitorial proceedings of the Aberdeen presbytery’, was content to send his deputy to remind the presbytery of the limits to its disciplinary powers (Burns 2018: 250–1). Irvine went unmolested by the Kirk for the rest of his life. No supporter of popery, Mercurius Politicus was nevertheless only too happy to publicise the Presbyterian embarrassment, glossing over Irvine’s confessional identity and implying to its readers that Irvine was an Independent. It ‘condemned the Scottish kirk for its “specious pretences of punishing impieties, when it is rather to ventilate the Presbyterian spleene upon such as cannot

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succumbe”’ (Mercurius Politicus, 22–29 January 1652, 1369, quoted in Burns 2018: 251). Religious groups had used the printing press from the late sixteenth century onwards and cast their gaze beyond Scotland. The ‘Presbyterian intelligentsia’ looked to a Latinate continental audience. Vernacular news publications were produced with the English market in mind. The same was true of the infant periodical press in Scotland. During the Bishops’ Wars, the Scottish Covenanters ‘produced justifications for their invasion of England’ from 1640 onwards, and ‘even established a newspaper in London, intended to win foreign support for their covenanted experiment’ (Spurlock 2011: 202). Scottish newspaper readers enjoyed domestic reports as well as those from England, Ireland and the Continent: ‘[a]ccounts of the massacre of Protestants in Piedmont in 1655 mingled with tales from the Caribbean of military encounters with the Spanish’ (Spurlock 2011: 203). Presses beyond government control offered oppositional voices: even the Stationers’ Company presses in Leith ‘did not always follow the disposition of the regime’, and the absence of a government monopoly or rigidly applied regulation in the 1650s meant that the Scottish press ‘experienced a renaissance’ during the Interregnum (Spurlock 2011: 203). Chelsea Reutke notes that attempts by the Stationers’ Company to regulate the Scottish and Irish presses, including the formation of a ‘printing guild constituted by members of the Stationers’ Company’ in Ireland after 1670, had ‘limited success’ (Reutke 2020: 289, n. 5).

Royalist News and Protestant Radicalism, 1642–51 The periodical press, then as now, included various publications with strong editorial approaches to their news content. As Jason McElligott and Joad Raymond have pointed out, royalist periodicals were rife with libellous, vulgar, obscene and scatological language. Popular culture and its tropes were deliberately deployed to engage the attention of anti-­Puritan conservative readers (McElligott 2004b: 148–58). During the First Civil War it was the mercuries such as the royalist Mercurius Aulicus, written initially by the cleric Peter Heylyn, and subsequently by Sir John Berkenhead, which provided this opinionated content. Its opposite number was Mercurius Britanicus by Thomas Audley and Marchamont Needham (Conboy 2004: 33–5). Other royalist newsbooks followed throughout the 1640s and early 1650s, often short-­ lived, including Mercurius Rusticus, Mercurius Elencticus, Mercurius Pragmaticus and The Man in the Moon. Much as the Parliament-­controlled press in the First Civil War depicted

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religion and the seventeenth-­c entury press 559 loyalist episcopalians as ignorant, enslaved and occasionally popish, royalist newsbooks portrayed radical Protestants as immoral, disruptive, hypocritical and anti-­social rebels. Mercurius Rusticus described, for example, ‘those Intruding Mechanicks, who without any Calling either from God or man, stepping from the Coblers Stall, the Botchers boord, or the Bricklayers Scaffold into the Pulpit, like Shebas Trumpet summon the people to Rebellion’, and decried iconoclasm of tombs and church buildings more generally (Mercurius Rusticus, 20 May 1643, sig. A4). Following the execution of Charles I, Oliver Cromwell was described as ‘Brewer Cromwell’, a reference to the social origins of at least one branch of his family (Mercurius Elencticus, 21–28 February 1649, unpag.). The ‘world turned upside down’ trope became widespread beyond the news. It appeared in diaries of obscure provincial clergymen, in ballads, as well as in newspapers. The actions of the Parliament were, according to the royalist press, an affront to God and to the natural order. Religious radicals, in these mid-seventeenthcentury periodicals, were all rebels, and rebels were almost all religious radicals. Even in earlier editions of Mercurius Aulicus, where the content was largely focused on military affairs, their authors depicted sectaries and radicals as disturbers of the peace. In an issue from early 1643, for example, the king’s response to parliamentarian negotiations described his attempts to protect the Prayer Book from ‘the scorne of Brownists, Anabaptists, and other Sectaries’ (Mercurius Aulicus, 29 January 1643–4 February 1643, 7). Attacks against orthodox Church of England clergy were described in depth in some royalist periodicals, including physical violence by radical proselytes, the interruption of services, insults and threats (Mercurius Rusticus, 2 June 1643, 18–21). An entire issue of Mercurius Rusticus, previously subtitled ‘The Countries Complaint of the Murthers, Robberies, Plunderings, and Other Outrages Committed by the Rebells on His Majesties Subjects’, was dedicated to the damage inflicted on cathedral churches (Mercurius Rusticus, 16 December 1643). According to Mercurius Rusticus, the ‘Tower of a Powerfull Ministry are Ignorant, Factious, Schismaticall ­ Ministers . . . ­ who are the Bellowes to blow up this fire that threatens the desolation of this Land’ (Mercurius Rusticus, 20 May 1643, sig. A4). Royalist newsbooks often fixated on scandalous stories of radical hypocrisy (see McElligott 2004b). Mercurius Aulicus, for example, depicted the radical preacher Hugh Peter as a fornicator, since he had an illegitimate child by his maidservant, and soldierly preachers were described elsewhere as hypocrites motivated by malice and envy, and

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Parliament’s radicals as gluttonous, greedy thieves (Mercurius Aulicus, 24 January–2 February 1649, sig. A2v; Mercurius Elencticus, 3–10 May 1648, 183, 185). After the execution of Charles I on 30 January 1649, all involved were depicted as profane murderers, revelling in ‘the sacred blood of the Lords anointed, and yet pretend Justice, Innocense and the like’ (Mercurius Elencticus, 21–28 February 1649, unpag.). While the tropes of royalist newsbooks were clearly and often wittily expressed, the descriptions of their targets were often remarkably general. Protestant radicals were described as ‘schismatical’ or ‘heretical’, their hatred for orthodoxy, Prayer Book services and church buildings outlined frequently, but their actual beliefs and practices remained somewhat obscure. These were not typological or theological works, but persuasive and entertaining polemics which played to the assumptions and prejudices of their readership. Royalist periodicals did describe particular newsworthy incidents of Protestant radicals and their behaviour, but these were uniformly negative and used to exemplify the perfidy and ignorance of the enemy. In this they were not ­unique – ­their parliamentarian counterparts typically portrayed episcopalians as backward and ignorant, listening to clergy babbling prayers before returning to their alehouses. The Welsh, in particular, were depicted as slavish and stupid in this regard, deluded by their provincial otherness from an understanding of true religion. The precise nature of episcopalian religion was better understood, but portrayed in an equally stereotyped and sketchy fashion. As in any work where polemic and news meet, royalist newsbooks were vague and unreliable in one sense, but in another, provide a fascinating insight into conservative views of radicals and their actions.

Conclusion This chapter has given a flavour of the connections between religion and the periodical press in the seventeenth century. Those connections took several principal forms: religious news in the press, both domestic and foreign; religious influence and control over the press; and religio-­political news. Even these wide themes are reductive, given that religion framed behaviour and attitudes so holistically. Religion pervaded the news, as it was pervasive throughout most other aspects of society. With that in mind, this chapter has provided brief introductions to several important areas where religion and the periodical press particularly interacted.

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case study 21 : papistry and the news 561

Case Study 21: Papistry and the News Katie McKeogh and Sarah Ward Clavier Religious publishers usually favoured tracts, pamphlets, treatises and books, rather than news publications. As adherents to a proscribed faith whose textual life was partially driven underground, Catholics and Protestant nonconformist groups found that these offered better vehicles for subversive publication, alongside prolific manuscript circulation. While it is beyond the remit of this chapter to chronicle the changing religio-­political landscape with its seasons of persecution for Catholics and nonconformists, a study of religion and the periodical press ought not omit believers outside the Church of England. Catholic texts represented multiple genres, including devotional, polemical, controversial, pastoral, martyrological and historical texts, all of which might interact with news while not necessarily constituting it. This case study looks to one example of a newspaper featuring news from the Catholic Church and, more surprisingly, a particular effort to include a discussion of developments in a Catholic religious order, the Society of Jesus. On the first Wednesday of October 1687 a monthly newsletter was published in London: Modern History, or the Monethly Account of all considerable Occurrences, civil, ecclesiastical and military; with all natural and philosophical productions and transactions. It enjoyed a two-­year run, ending in October 1689, and the preface to the first issue promised ‘the Drawing of All Memorable, and Notable Events and Relations out of the several Fragments that have been Publish’d concerning them into One Entire Collection: That is to Say, in the Regular Series of a Monthly Account’ (Modern History, October 1687, sig. A2r). The subject matter was diplomatic, military and intellectual foreign news, but it displayed a sustained interest in Catholic developments, such as the military campaigns of Catholic national and regional powers, framed in confessional terms as the righteous prince against the upstart infidel. Nevertheless, the preface had not misled its readers about the inclusion of ‘natural and philosophical productions’. One issue devoted eleven pages to ‘Natures, Arts, and Sciences’, detailing new medical theories and advances in scientific instruments (Modern History, May 1688, 33–44). Theological proceedings were considered newsworthy. An account headed ‘Sciences’ summarised a tract about a dispute between the Pope and the Bishop of Tournai on theological matters including the locus of Church authority (whether it was ‘principally in the Body of the Church, or in the Person of the Pope’), the baptism of heretics and papal infallibility (Modern History, July 1688, 35–40). A subsequent issue gave an account of a supposed rift between Cardinal ­Camus – t­he Bishop and Prince of G ­ renoble – ­and the Pope. Camus was ‘hotly reported’ to have written to the curates in his diocese on the

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subject of the ‘Invocation of Saints and Relicts’, but the report dismisses such ‘Rumours’ as ‘only the Fictions of certain Malicious People’. Camus’s orthodoxy was not to be questioned: ‘For that Prelate has asserted nothing but what is conformable to the Doctrine of the Council of Trent; and there needs no more than to have recourse to that to render this past all Question’ (Modern History, December 1687, 5). We can detect serious editorial disapproval of attempts to sow disunity among Catholics or to disparage the clergy. Modern History was published by John Phillips, the nephew of John Milton, but laudatory accounts of the Jesuits led J. H. Crehan to argue for a pro-­Jesuit patron or even author. Crehan supposed that Phillips’s brother Christopher, a Catholic with Jesuit links, was behind the publication’s apparent Jesuit interests (1952: 287–91). Whether or not this is the case, the periodical’s sympathy for, and interest in, Catholicism is clear. The Pope, frequently referred to as ‘His Holiness’, and the Holy Roman Emperor were hymned; in relating the return of the Marquis of Baden, the author wrote approvingly of his ‘Negotiations concerning the Weal and Tranquillity of the Sacred Roman Empire’ (Modern History, May 1688, 2). The first issue spoke respectfully of ‘His Holyness having thus done his utmost for the Good of Christendom in General’ (Modern History, October 1687, 2). The July issue of 1688 announced the arrival of Lord Thomas Howard as envoy to the Pope to inform him of the birth of the Prince of Wales, being ‘received by the Holy Father with all the Transports of joy and tenderness which the news of so great a Blessing could inspire’. The author expressed his sincere hope that this ‘will still the more render his Lordship an agreeable and efficacious Instrument towards the reconciling the matter of the Franchises’ (Modern History, July 1688, 1–2). In relating diplomatic news, the author wrote of Jesuit achievements with breathless admiration, such as a celebrated Lent sermon course by Pietro Valle SJ, Italian preacher to the Holy Roman Emperor, at the imperial chapel in Vienna, which ‘extraordinary Performance fill’d the whole Court with Admiration, they never ceasing to praise the singular virtue, Zeal and fervour of spirit’ (Modern History, May 1688, 10–11, quoted in Crehan 1952: 291). This was far from the only time that very specific items of Jesuit interest found a place in the Modern History. Two chariots seen at a pageant at Brussels were ‘the ingenious invention of the Jesuites’ (Modern History, May 1688, 31, quoted in Crehan 1952: 291). Three ‘eminent Jesuits’ who had ‘died almost at the same time’ in France were listed among other recent deaths (Modern History, December 1687, 39, quoted in Crehan 1952: 290). One issue opened with the decision of the papacy to remove the limit on the number of novices admitted to the Society of Jesus in Italy (Modern History, January 1688, 1). The first issue detailed a clash between Pope Innocent XI and Louis XIV concerning the French embassy in Rome and favoured the papal side (Crehan

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case study 21 : papistry and the news 563 1952: 289). Holland was referred to as being seen ‘as the Protectrice and Abetter of Herisy, that as long as it continued in it’s [sic] present posture, they could never bring about the great design form’d by all the Catholique Princes of Europe to pull down the Protestant Party’ (Modern History, September 1688, 3). Here the author does not wholly nail his colours to the mast, but his tone is approving. A Protestant author, or one concerned with the rising tide of Catholic influence following the king’s conversion, is unlikely to have referred to the body of his coreligionists as a ‘Party’ rather than a legitimate Church. That the author felt able to commit this to print demonstrates the opportunism with which pro-­Catholic publishers responded to James II. The appearance of seemingly Catholic (or not sufficiently anti-­Catholic) publications from the periodical press during the reign of James II was mirrored in other genres, but those who published Catholic-­leaning material were still taking a risk. Obadiah Walker, the master of University College, Oxford, published the spiritual works of the late Abraham Woodhead (d. 1678), sometime translator of the Life of St Teresa of Avila, ‘so that learned and devout men might read the truth about Catholic devotions and religious orders and dispel their prejudices’ (Crehan 1952: 296). Walker’s conversion to Catholicism, hitherto only suspected, was known from 1686, and the sale of his books was promptly banned in Oxford by the vice-­chancellor of the university. The dean of Christ Church, John Fell, ‘hitherto a friend, deleted Walker from his will as a lessee of the university’s privilege of printing’. Walker established a Catholic oratory in his lodgings and had Jesuit chaplains. Unsurprisingly, Walker was distinctly unpopular with the godly of Oxford, who barred him from using the university press. Undeterred, he set up his own in University College in 1687, and published Woodhead’s unapologetically Catholic tract Two Discourses Concerning the Adoration of our Blessed Saviour in the Holy Eucharist (Beddard 2008). As is evident from the case of the Modern History, James II’s conversion occasioned an increase in Catholic, or Catholic-­ leaning, periodicals. Catholics seized the opportunity to publish more freely, and to advance news of the universal Church. It was not, however, a time of unfettered liberty for Catholics. Modern History seldom commented on British affairs, much less British religion. By focusing on foreign news, the publication joined others that satisfied readers’ appetites for news from abroad but also maintained a cautious distance from domestic politics.

Chapter Twenty-­five

RUNAWAY ANNOUNCEMENTS AND NARRATIVES OF THE ENSLAVED John W. Cairns

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eaders of the eighteenth-­c entury British press were perfectly aware of the presence in their island home of enslaved men and women of African, Indian and other ethnicities, just as they were perfectly aware of enslavement in the colonies and elsewhere around the world. It is, for example, possible to trace in British newspapers over seventy advertisements for the actual sale of men, women and ­children – ­and once even of a baby (with his mother). As well as general shipping news noting colonial commerce, commercial announcements are found relating to slave-­trading, such as that informing ‘Gentlemen concerned in the Slave Trade’ of the closing of one firm in Grenada with the transfer of its business to another (Edinburgh Evening Courant, 29 June 1768). The court cases that challenged these practices of enslavement, most notably that of Somerset v. Stewart, also featured in the press (Cairns 2012b: 292, 296–7), as did meetings of the developing abolitionist movement (Edinburgh Evening Courant, 5 March 1792). The presence in British newspapers of advertisements for runaway slaves has long been recognised. Thus, in a work first published in 1848, Sir Daniel Wilson referred to two examples in the Edinburgh newspapers (Wilson 1875: 290). After the Second World War, Little and Banton drew on them for historical aspects of their sociological studies (Little 1947: 168–70; Banton 1955: 22). Scholars have used these announcements of runaways and sales for insights into the situation of the black population in the United Kingdom in the Georgian era (Walvin 1986: 32, 36, 62–3; Gerzina 1995: 7; Chater 2009: 92–5). There have been attempts to draw on a more systematic collection of such announcements to explore aspects of the lives of enslaved Africans and Indians in Scotland (Cairns 2012b: 305–10; 2013: 156–9). To do 564

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runaway announcements and enslaved narratives 565 so is now made easier by the website, ‘Runaway Slaves in Britain’, produced by a team at the University of Glasgow (‘Runaway Slaves in Britain’ 2018). Molineux has injected a note of caution about such collections, making the fair point that they are devoid of context (2020: 585); but this collection, a searchable database of 835 advertisements, provides a foundation for much of this chapter, which places them in a more general knowledge of eighteenth-­century newspapers and their varied historical contexts. One important context is that of other runaways. The advertisements for enslaved runaways are comparable to those for runaways more generally, particularly those seeking the return of servants under indenture and apprentices, as well as for sailors and soldiers. Indeed, the conventions of the typical notice for an enslaved runaway were developed in the relatively frequent advertisements for runaways in the London newspapers of the later seventeenth century. In these one finds the age, appearance, clothes, skills and any distinguishing marks of the runaway concisely set out, leading to the announcement of contact details and a reward. If the runaway has taken any property, this is also described. Two examples from the same issue of the London Gazette (16 August 1688) exemplify this On the 8th instant one John Gampson, a middle siz’d Man, with brown Hair, sad colour’d Cloaths, round Fac’d, broad speech; went away from his Master Mr. George Brown Sider-­Merchant at the Sider Mill in High Holborn. Whoever gives notice of him to Mr. Brown aforesaid, shall have a Guinea Reward. A Black boy about 14 Years of Age, small bandy legs, splay footed run away from Mr. Bast in Ax Yard, King-­Street, Westminster, with a blue Livery lined with red. Whoever secures him, and gives Notice thereof to Mr Bast aforesaid, shall have 10 s. Reward. The style is the same for soldiers (London Gazette, 12 August 1686, William Eaton, soldier aged 30). This equivalence of style remained consistent through the following century (Edinburgh Courant, 3 April 1721, Humphrey Brown, deserting soldier; Edinburgh Advertiser, 12 February 1773, James Bisset, runaway 13-­ year-­ old servant; Edinburgh Advertiser, 7 October 1774, John Flight, runaway indentured millwright). There was nothing unique in the style of advertisements for runaways seemingly held as enslaved, which also turn up in announcements in the London press in the later seventeenth century. To

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give one example of a servant considered enslaved (London Gazette, 5 November 1691): Went away from her Master near 2 weeks since a Black Girle about 15 years old; she had on a black cloth Gown and Petticoat, with a Brass Collar about her Neck, written on John Campion at the Ship Tavern at Ratcliff-­Cross his Negro. Whoever gives notice of her to the said John Campion, shall have a guinea reward. In 1695 we find a very fully developed runaway announcement, covering description, background and skills (Post Boy, 13 August 1695): Run away from James Thomas about 5 Weeks since a Negro Man or Blackmore, aged about 21 Years, named Caesar; he is spare of Body and pretty Tall, short Hair close to his Head, thin Vizage and goes Lame, having had a cut cross his sinues of his heel, where there is a great Scar if not a Soar, being on his right Leg: Through Nostrils have been Holes, the marks still to be discerned, one of his Ears have been part cut away, when he went away he had a Mounteer Cap lined with Red, a Wastcoat and drawers made of course White Cloath, he speaks good English and pretends to be a Sea-­man, having formerly lived in Barbados. If any one can give account of him to James Thomas in Mincing-lane, London, or to William Eberwes Ship-­wright on Rotherhithe-wall, so that he may be had again, shall receive 20 s. Reward. This young man had the single name typical of an enslaved person, and his links to the sea, physical state and background in Barbados are all telling. This style of notice was standard through the century, though sometimes differently structured: description of the runaway, usually with name and any alias, name of master or mistress, mode of absconding, details of talents and skills, including languages, ability to play a musical instrument (the French horn seems particularly common), and a reward. At least one contact name is normally given for the reward, who is usually not the master or mistress. Specific rewards are usually stated, ranging from 5 shillings to 30 guineas. Much further work would be needed to gain an understanding of the level of reward and any tendency to increase in value. The reward is occasionally increased in a second notice, but sometimes masters feared being held to ransom for a larger reward (Daily Post, 4 December 1731), insisting that no greater reward would be offered. It was quite common for notices, after advertising the reward, to address the runaway, stating that if he or she came home they ‘would be kindly received’ (randomly

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runaway announcements and enslaved narratives 567 chosen: Daily Courant, 14 March 1713). Finally, although there had always been the very occasional threat to those ‘harbouring’, ‘concealing’ or ‘entertaining’ the runaway, warnings of legal action against them became progressively routine in the 1720s, remaining common thereafter. Turning more to the substance, the contacts for the information or reward can vary considerably. In Scotland, it is quite often the publisher of the paper; in the south-­east of England, however, it is frequently an individual in a specific coffee house or a coffee house more generally. Of course, this was the era when the ‘mercantile’ coffee houses in the City of London were central to commercial life in the British Empire (Brinkman-­Schwartz 2021). But there can be a large variety of classes of contacts, advertisements listing, for example, individual tradesmen, mercantile houses or individuals connected with the docks. It is often possible to identify a link or personal connection. Thus, when the Bengali servant of Thomas Wibergh absconded, one of the contacts was the House-­Keeper of the House of Commons, where Wibergh served as Serjeant-­at-­Arms (Post Boy, 5 April, 10 April, 1 May 1711). Captain Oliphant Kinloch designated his neighbour and family connection, James Smyth, Writer to the Signet in Edinburgh, as a contact when his ‘Negroe Slave’ ran away (Edinburgh Advertiser, 7 June 1768). The contacts and addresses of masters reveal much about their social, political and mercantile links. But it is worth noting that, after John Fielding became the magistrate at Bow Street, he was often listed as the contact for the reward. One assumes he was a useful and well-­ known contact, with facilities to hold runaways. Not all notices seek runaways as such. They can focus on the individual as a thief, even though runaways often are reported as having taken things. Thus in 1768 ‘Will. Lewis, otherwise Sambo, a Negro’ was sought on suspicion of having stolen a banknote belonging to his master, the contact being John Fielding (Public Advertiser, 18 July 1768). Other notices indicate a suspicion that the individual sought has got lost (Daily Journal, 4 July 1730), or has been enticed away, or has even been stolen, such as 11-­year-­old Caesar, who spoke ‘only a little broken English’ (Daily Courant, 10 October 1713). Thus, the adolescent Vernon, who spoke little English, was advertised as having been ‘Stolen or Stray’d’ from an inn (London Daily Post and General Advertiser, 27 July 1741). One can readily imagine the vulnerability of young individuals, unable to communicate in a strange environment. It might also be noted that announcements very occasionally note that a ‘Negro’ has engaged to go abroad and ask anyone who claims him as his ‘Bond Slave’ to enquire at a specified contact (Edinburgh Evening

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Courant, 11 December 1732). This last hints at the assumption of the probable enslavement of someone of African or Indian heritage. The notices indicate why the study of runaway announcements has proved so compelling. They provide apparently disinterested information about a group of men, women and children who have otherwise usually left little trace, suggesting the possibility of significant insight, not otherwise available, into both those held as enslaved and those holding them and the world in which they lived. This is not the place, however, for a detailed analysis of the runaways (see Newman 2019); instead, this contribution will focus on aspects of the announcements in their historical contexts, with the aim of facilitating and encouraging further research. For example, between January 1700 and December 1709, the British newspapers on the ‘Runaway Slaves in Britain’ website contained seventy-­one advertisements searching for around sixty runaways. Of course, none in these ten years is explicitly described as a ‘slave’; but there can be little doubt but that most were held in some way enslaved. One, for example, is described as ‘belonging to the Royal Africa Company’ (Daily Courant, 14 January 1707). If this remains ambiguous, four are described as wearing collars, two of brass (Daily Courant, 22 May 1703; Post Man and the Historical Account, 24 June 1704) and one each of iron and silver (Daily Courant, 8 January 1704; Post Man and the Historical Account, 19 September 1706). Two of these collars bear standard ownership inscriptions. Two teenage runaways were branded or tattooed: Quoshey (a name of African origin), with the initials of the person to whom he was described as ‘belonging’ (London Gazette, 30 December 1700), and another, unnamed, with the initials ‘W.B.’ on each shoulder (Daily Courant, 20 and 23 June 1704; London Gazette, 10 July 1704). Finally, while a few of the runaways in this decade had both a given name and a surname, most had the single name typical of an enslaved individual, and indeed some possessed common enslaved names such as the ever-­popular Pompey, Cato and Caesar. In later decades the term ‘slave’ is found, most commonly in the 1740s and 1760s, but it is never the most common term used to designate a runaway. It is also relatively rarely used in such advertisements in the colonies. Of course, its occasional use raises the question of the actual status of such individuals. This is not the place for a full discussion but it is worth noting that some are described as ‘indentured servants’ or ‘indentured apprentices’ or simply as ‘apprentices’. The term ‘bond-­servant’ is found (Daily Advertiser, 29 November 1744; Glasgow Journal, 4 March 1744). The notice for ‘Jacko, or John

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runaway announcements and enslaved narratives 569 Tortinsong’ describes him as an ‘apprentice as well as purchased slave’. One of the last advertisements in the Glasgow collection describes a runaway in 1780 as ‘not only the slave but the apprentice’ of his master (Liverpool General Advertiser, or the Commercial Register, 5 May 1780). It may be that advertisers were struggling to find a way of describing the relationship in a British context (Cairns 2012a). It is telling that one runaway was described as ‘a Bond-­Servant, but was his present Master’s Property in the Plantations’ (Daily Advertiser, 29 November 1744). One continues to find the occasional individual with a slave collar, such as the runaway who wore a steel collar that described him as an ‘indentur’d servant’ (Daily Advertiser, 20 June 1748). It is also worth noting that around 15 per cent of the individuals who absconded in these ten years from 1700 to 1709 can be identified as of South Asian origin, referred to variously as ‘East Indian Black’ or ‘Indian Black’. About 20 per cent had run away from a ship or from a master identifiable as a ship’s commander, whether merchant or Royal Navy. Addresses listed for masters and contacts include classic dock and other riverside areas such as Wapping, Deptford, Shadwell, Ratcliff and the Isle of Dogs. Of course, this reflects the fact that all the newspapers involved were London-­based, but it is also an indication of trade and the activities of the East India Company. Given that this period was during the War of the Spanish Succession, which had a colonial aspect, shipping also offered runaways opportunities for escape; thus, 15-­year-­old Lewis was thought to be on a ship in the river heading for Leghorn (Livorno) or Guinea (Post Man and Historical Account, 27 November 1707), while Kingston, after being found on a naval ship at Chatham, was brought back only to escape again (Daily Courant, 27 December 1707, 10 February 1710). Ships were always seen as providing a potential escape for runaways, such as Philip Mardery, described as a ‘Negro’, who absconded from his Newfoundland-­bound ship at Weymouth in 1700, since so many held enslaved in Britain had experience of the sea (Post Boy, 11 April 1700). Runaways could also head for London for greater anonymity (Post Boy, 4 September 1707). Analysis of subsequent decades confirms this picture, with some variations. Much of this would be worth further research, as indeed would consideration of the relatively small number of women who are reported as absconding. There is often enough information to allow exploration of individual cases. Notable individuals can be found advertising for runaways; the advertisements also help clarify links and connections between merchant houses.

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Patterns of advertising are revealing, suggesting historical change as well as continuity. For example, the decade 1760–69 has more than double the number of announcements for runaways sought than any other decade between 1700 and 1780. The one exception is 1740–49, which has more than half as many notices again than the norm of about eighty-­five. The most intense period of absconding, as represented by the announcements, is undoubtedly the early 1760s. The most likely explanation is the opportunities provided for the acquisition of enslaved individuals through warfare and colonial expansion, which also offered those enslaved opportunities to escape. The 1740s saw Britain involved in the War of Jenkins’ Ear and that of the Austrian Succession; from 1756 to 1763 Britain fought in the Seven Years War. Both these wars involved the Caribbean and continental America, as well as India, with France and Spain as the main opponents. This explains, for example, one Colonel Stuart’s possession of ‘a slave named Andre’ who spoke ‘French, Spanish and a little English’ (Public Advertiser, 22 March 1764). Both wars were marked by considerable privateering. For example, a runaway ‘Negroe Man’ is reported as purchased from a captured French privateer (Williamson’s Liverpool Advertiser, and Mercantile Chronicle, 30 January 1761), while King, the runaway slave of the Franklin family, was sought by William, Benjamin’s son, as having the ‘intention of going on board some privateer’ (Public Advertiser, 16 February 1762). War led to the presence in Britain of French-­speaking enslaved men who had been born in Martinique, whose circumstances led them to run (Public Advertiser, 14 February 1759; Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 31 October 1765). Numerous French-­speakers (often speaking no or bad English), who absconded from ships (Public Advertiser, 22 November 1759), may well have been acquired in war as prizes, such as ‘Joseph Amazon alias Joseph Williams’, the property of Lieutenant Cowling on HMS Amazon (Public Ledger, or, Daily Register of Intelligence and Commerce, 29 July 1760). The need for sailors during these wars in particular provided opportunities for runaways, many of whom had experience of the sea, and shipping always offered a means of escape. Masters certainly were very aware of the possibility of enslaved servants taking to the sea. Notices often warned commanders not to take runaways on board. These were real anxieties. It is worth noting the story of James Teernon, who ran away in November 1760, signed on a ship for a voyage to Guadeloupe, and returned to London, where his master was still seeking him, a year after his original flight (Public Advertiser, 11 November 1761).

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runaway announcements and enslaved narratives 571 There has been considerable scholarship in the USA both about and particularly drawing on and using such advertisements, and it is helpful to say a little about it here because of the influence it has exercised. From the moment newspapers started to be printed in the American colonies, including in the Caribbean, such announcements are found. Thus, shortly after it started to publish, the Boston NewsLetter included an advertisement for the runaway Penelope (26 June 1704). On 30 July 1718 the newly established Weekly Jamaica Courant contained five individual advertisements for a total of ten runaways. As early as 1916 the Journal of Negro History, under the editorship of Carter G. Woodson, published in its ‘Documents’ section over fifty pages of such advertisements, organised under a variety of headings, reflecting interests in languages spoken, literacy, education, circumstances of life, links with the West Indies and so on (Woodson 1916). In the 1940s the work of Lorenzo Greene drew on these advertisements as a source of information about the enslaved Africans of New England (Greene 1942: 33–46, 145–9; 1944). The richness of this material continued to attract, so that one can find, for example, an analysis of fugitives in South Carolina based on the runaway notices (Meaders 1975) or such announcements used as a means of approaching the idea of slave communities (Johnson 1981). In 1983 Lathan Windley published four volumes of advertisements for runaway slaves, covering the period from the 1730s to 1790, offering little interpretation or analysis. The geographical range was Virginia, North Carolina, Maryland, South Carolina and Georgia (Windley 1983). Several scholars followed Windley’s path, producing additional and supplementary collections, notably from the more northern colonies and states. Thus, a selection from the runaway notices found in Franklin’s Pennsylvania Gazette was published in 1989 (Smith and Wojtowicz 1989: 5), with another collection for New York and New Jersey in 1994 (Hodges and Brown [1994] 2019). In 1997 Meaders published a collection of advertisements from Virginia from 1801–20 (Meaders [1997] 2012). Despite the recent and continuing development of websites digitising this type of material (Molineux 2020: 583), scholars have continued to publish printed collections, often directed at teaching needs. Thus, a volume of fugitive announcements from one of the Charleston newspapers, covering a single decade at the end of the eighteenth century, was published in 2015 (Brown and Sims 2015), while earlier material was republished, such as Meaders’ collection in 2012 or the Hodges and Brown collection, republished in 2019 with a new introduction. There have also been other reprints. Though the focus of these more systematic publications has been on runaway

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slaves of African and other origin and descent, Meaders has published the first volume of a collection of announcements seeking white indentured servants (1993), while the selection of runaway advertisements from the Pennsylvania Gazette also included some for runaway white indentured servants (Smith and Wojtowicz 1989: 26, 161–72). All these collections offer helpful comparative material that assists our understanding of the British announcements. Scholars have mined these advertisements for information about the enslaved community. While written from the slaveholder’s perspective, the physical descriptions they contain are probably accurate, as are the accounts of languages spoken, names and aliases, skills (including levels of literacy) and abilities, all of which were included to aid identification and recapture of the runaway. On the other hand, more ‘moralistic’ evaluations, such as ‘a very artful and insinuating Fellow’ (Parker’s New-York Gazette, 14 January 1762, in Hodges and Brown [1994] 2019: 90), or ‘excessively complaisent [sic], obsequious, and insinuating’ (Parker’s New-York Gazette, 29 April 1762, in Hodges and Brown [1994] 2019: 92), reflect the advertiser’s subjective perception of his enslaved servant. In the early 1970s historical research started to emphasise the lived experience of African Americans, focusing on sources that emphasised their lives, drawing on, for example, slavery narratives (Blassingame 1972) and runaway advertisements (Mullin 1972). These two works were part of a general intellectual reaction against Stanley Elkins’s popular if much-­contested view of slaves as infantilised and passive. To the fore came a new emphasis on the agency of the enslaved (Genovese 1967; Lane 1971). From our perspective Mullin’s study is particularly important. First, the author focused on one period, that at issue here, while viewing slavery as a changing, developing institution, adapting to different circumstances, variable in its nature, but also full of tensions (Mullin 1972: vii–xii). Secondly, he drew on the runaway announcements in a novel and interesting way, teasing information from them to bolster that gathered from other sources, to develop ideas and explanations of community, assimilation and acculturation, which were used to explain the work carried out by individual slaves, the activity of fugitives, and their aims and purposes in flight. Though criticised for some of the theoretical underpinnings of his analysis (Klein 1973), Mullin’s much-­praised book demonstrated the richness of the runaway notices. This reorientation of general discussion towards slave agency facilitated development of an interpretation of runaways as ‘rebels’ resisting slavery, as individuals who ‘self-­ emancipated’, allowing assessment of runaways to be located in a developing discussion of insurrection,

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runaway announcements and enslaved narratives 573 revolt and rebellion (Mullin 1972: 140–63). Scholars have even seen the advertisements as embodying ‘proto-­slave’ narratives, short life stories, even if told by another, each demonstrating a self-­fashioning of a life (Waldstreicher 1999: 248–9; cf. Bly 2012: 1). Bly has identified resistance through dress, accomplishments and other characteristics indicating individualism and independence of attitude (Bly 2016), and has argued that the silence of the enslaved, whose gestures are often described, could amount to a co-­authoring of runaway announcements (Bly 2021). These analyses may help us understand the British runaway announcements. Indeed, it might also be profitable to think of how they differ, as a means of understanding the different experiences of these individuals whether in Britain or the colonies. It appears as though there were significant tensions in Britain over the presence of this body of Indian and African men and women. Did their experiences differ historically through the era? It looks at first sight as if they did. What were their different motivations in running away? Can they be discovered? Where were they running to? What is the significance of the baptism mentioned in several notices? Often there is information about where the runaways have gone. Indeed, sometimes their journeys can be traced. There are other puzzles and questions. It is striking, for example, how many runaways are described as stammering or having a speech impairment. One can speculate why. But one suspects that reflection on the colonial notices will help understanding of those in the British newspapers. It is important, however, also to be aware of the need to consider the lives of these men and women in a broad context. They are found in all parts of the British Isles. One runaway had lived two years in Cork (Public Advertiser, 30 September 1757); another ran away from Cork (Williamsons Liverpool Advertiser, and Mercantile Chronicle, 16 November 1764). They often did not simply live a British life but had lived an almost global life. Some were born in Africa; some were born in the Americas. They had moved around. A number spoke a variety of languages. They had differing skills. Many had experienced a colonial as well as a metropolitan life. To run away is to exercise agency and to attempt to regain control of one’s life. It is worth noting that Tom (alias Peter), a creole blacksmith from St Kitts, escaped to Britain with a faked passport on the fleet of 1759 (Public Advertiser, 20 December 1759). Some sought to return to the West Indies or fled to resist such return. All of this has interesting and far-­reaching implications. A proper understanding of the lives of these people and of their masters’ and mistresses’ attitudes to them must take this into account.

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This analysis has merely touched the surface of this rich resource. There are many other fascinating aspects. Some of these individuals were evidently well known in the places where they had resided. They could have had friends who might have helped them. British readers could be expected to recognise the ritual scarification that some had undergone in Africa, as well as terms such as ‘Ibo’ or ‘Ebo’ (Igbo) found in the advertisements (Public Advertiser, 19 February 1765; Edinburgh Evening Courant, 5 October 1765). Notices and advertisements in general give considerable insight into a society. These announcements help provide a better understanding of the tensions and complexity of eighteenth-­century British life and notably of late eighteenth-­century slavery narratives and works, such as those of Olaudah Equiano, Ignatius Sancho and Ottobah Cuguano (John Stuart). They provide insight into the context out of which they arose.

Chapter Twenty-­six

THE PRESS IN LITERATURE AND DRAMA Michael Palmer

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hakespeare died some five years before the first ‘newspapers’ appeared in London as English translations from the Dutch. In what would later be known as Germany and the Netherlands, newspapers had appeared earlier, as had newsletters – avvisi, coranti – and gazzetta in Italy, a favoured setting for Shakespeare’s plays. The latter frequently mentioned letters, messages and messengers, and made fun with a character’s ability to read and write (for example, Speed in The Two Gentlemen of Verona). Aspersions on messengers echoed the ‘killing the messenger’ theme from ancient Greek drama. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries many ­authors – ­a term used in its widest ­sense – ­enriched their prose and verse with classical allusions. Likewise, while they praised writing, reading and the book as furthering enlightenment and diversity, if not freedom, of expression, they disparaged ‘journalists’ and hacks. Invective, satire and polemics abounded. When Ben Jonson (1572–1637) decided to publish his plays (1616), a critic noted ‘Pray tell me Ben, where doth the mistery lurke / what others call a play, you call a worke’ (Wits Recreations, 1640, G3v). With other matter, plays were considered ephemera, unworthy of conservation: Thomas Bodley, founder of Oxford’s Bodleian Library, saw no point in keeping ‘suche bookes as almanackes, plaies & an infinit number, that are daily printed of very unvorthy masters’ (Wheeler 1926: 219–20). Jonson’s satire of ‘news-­mongering’, The Staple of News (1626), merely added to the disrepute of what was a craft, a trade, not a profession. Words that would gain currency among ­journalists – ­including the very terms ‘journalist’ and ‘newspaper’ – emerged during the period. Many were pejorative – ‘hack’ was a poor scribbler; many lived in ‘Grub Street’ – grub referring probably to refuse. The word ‘novel’ (nova: new things from the Italian novella for ‘new’, ‘news’, or ‘short story 575

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of something new’) still had something of ‘new news’ when it began to describe a literary genre; in the eighteenth century ‘novelist’ could mean a ‘newsmonger’. In the early seventeenth century ‘newsbooks’ and in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries ‘intelligence’ were appropriate terms. Terminology was often multifaceted. Many authors fulfilled seemingly contradictory roles: John Milton (1608–74), the poet and writer of pamphlets and polemics (about divorce, for instance), argued for a certain liberty of printing and opposed pre-­publication censorship – ‘he who destroys a good book, kills reason itself ’ (Areopagitica:A speech by John Milton for the Liberty of Unlicenc’d Printing, To the Parliament of England) – yet he was briefly a censor in Cromwell’s Britain for Mercurius Politicus, the Commonwealth’s leading newspaper in the 1650s. For many decades in the seventeenth century religious and political disputes intertwined: the exercise of power, and the possibility of reporting and even discussing its deeds, were all at issue. The Civil War heightened the stakes: there were two seats of power, royalists and a king by divine right, and Parliament. Talented pressmen might serve each cause alternately: Marchamont Ne(e)dham (1620–78) wrote for both sides: having described Charles I as possessing ‘a guilty Conscience’ and ‘bloody hands’, he later described Oliver Cromwell as ‘Crum-­Hell’ and still later became the only journalist trusted by Cromwell. Milton, as a secretary to the Council of State in the early 1650s, oversaw Nedham’s publishing activity. Nedham wrote in 1650: ‘the design of this pamphlet being to undeceive the people, it must be written in a jocular way’ (Frank 1980: 90). In a time of religious and political strife, the arts in the mid-­sevententh century appeared secondary considerations. The ups and downs of the struggle for a freer press and the right to report Parliament spanned the period between the Civil War of the 1640s and the furore over John Wilkes in the 1760s–70s. From the Restoration of the monarchy (1660), the later Stuarts practised tight press controls exercised by figures such as Henry Muddiman and Roger L’Estrange, yet unlicensed papers arose before 1679, when the Licensing Act suddenly lapsed before being renewed in 1685. A diversity of writing styles, of genres, often prevailed. Henry Fielding (1707–54), an early English novelist, was a judge, a businessman, a successful ­playwright – ­his satires of government led Walpole to the theatrical Licensing Act of ­1737 – ­and waged ‘paper wars’, battling periodical writers, the ‘armies of Grub Street’; he outlined a Universal Register Office, an advertising scheme that recalled French ­forebears – a­ n essay of Montaigne (2007: ch. 35, bk 1) and the practice of Théophraste Renaudot.

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the press in literature and drama 577 Another major early novelist, a rival of Fielding, Samuel Richardson (1689–1761), was a master printer whose presses produced about 10,000 pieces, including novels, historical texts, Acts of Parliament and newspapers, before turning to writing novels. Praised by Alexander Pope and Samuel Johnson, he employed Oliver Goldsmith as proofreader. In the eighteenth century men of the Woodfall family distinguished themselves as printers, booksellers, editors and parliamentary reporters. And Daniel Defoe (1660–1731), once dubbed ‘the supreme journalist’, was a trader, writer, journalist, pamphleteer and s­ py – ­a true jack of all trades. The London Post serialised his novel Moll Flanders (1722–23). The interconnections were unending. Writer-­ printer-­ publishers abounded. It was likely that during its first century producing newspapers was a complementary source of revenue for printers seeking to keep their plant regularly employed. The printer headed the paper, generally comprising four pages (of varying formats); his position changed later with the development of advertising.With the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695, printer-­ publishers and journalists flourished, despite restraints such as the stamp duty of 1712. Total annual sales of newspapers in England, on the basis of possibly dubious figures, grew from 2.5 million in 1713 to 16 million in 1801. The first London daily, the Daily Courant, appeared in 1702; there were sixteen by the end of 1792. The provincial press also grew, its content often the result of ‘scissors and paste’. Much of the greatest talent among authors moving from work as hacks to journalism of lasting merit was found less in the daily press, often politics-­centred, than in weekly or monthly periodicals and pamphlets. Swift’s On the Conduct of the Allies (1711) was held to be the most brilliant polemic of Queen Anne’s era, but Johnson and Fielding also graced their columns. And Joseph Addison’s and Richard Steele’s celebrated Spectator, preceded by Steele’s Tatler, might have been published daily, but favoured the essay, a genre in which periodicals, as opposed to dailies, excelled. The Spectator lasted from 1711 to 1712. Each issue of some 2,500 words claimed to interest the educated literary class. Women were also a target audience, the periodical declaring that it sought to increase the number of women who were ‘of a more elevated life and conversation’. The Spectator sought to provide readers with topics for well-­reasoned and polite discussion. It promoted the family, marriage and courtesy. The paper was revived without Steele in 1714, appearing thrice weekly for six months. It was read and discussed in coffee houses, then a venue all the rage in London. Pope referred to ‘a man visiting the Garraway’s,

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Will’s and Smyrna during the day’ and his mock-­heroic poem The Rape of the Lock (1712) satirises a high-­society quarrel based on coffee house gossip. Eighteeenth-­century newsletters and newspapers were focused on ‘intelligence’, not on literature. The essay was a literary genre in which famous names first frequented the press. Defoe, in his Review of the affairs of France and of all Europe (1704–13, weekly, bi-­weekly, tri-­ weekly), was one of the first. The Review came to include the Scandal Club, in which Defoe wrote on a variety of ­subjects – ­political, social, commercial: in a little under ten years he produced some 5,000 such pages. The club idea, imitated by others including Steele and Addison, favoured a semblance of verisimilitude and a conversational style. Defoe combined moral essays with a touch of humour. His direct style announced the prose of his Journal of the Plague Year (1722). With Defoe, writing in the years after the lapse of the Licensing Act, the opinions of an individual in the public eye counted at a time of a nascent ‘public opinion’: ‘what I approve, I defend, what I dislike I censure’ he declared in 1712 (Defoe 1840: xcii). Legend has it that, when pilloried in the stocks, he was welcomed with flowers by the onlookers. In many ways, Steele’s Tatler and the Addison–Steele Spectator owed much to Defoe. The notion of a ‘club’ allowing for interventions on a range of topics found many takers, including one in Ireland, the Dublin Spectator. The skills of Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) were different. His A Tale of a Tub. Written for the Universal Improvement of Mankind is a prose parody of the morals and ethics of the English. Having been a priest in Ireland, Swift satirised the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches and English Dissenters. Published in 1704, it was composed between 1694 and 1697. A Tory, Swift backed the Harley (or Oxford– Bolingbroke) ministry (1710–14) in the Examiner, which he edited from 1710 to 1714. Harley, a former Whig who had changed sides, was in office when divisions between the two factions were at their height, and a ‘paper war’ broke out between their supporters. Harley’s government was backed by Swift, Defoe and Pope. Swift’s On the Conduct of the Allies (1711), published during the War of the Spanish Succession, was hugely s­ uccessful – s­ elling 11,000 copies in two ­months – ­and was held to have contributed to the downfall of John Churchill, the Duke of Marlborough, often considered Britain’s greatest soldier: whether this War were prudently begun or not, it is plain, that the true Spring or Motive of it, was the aggrandising of a

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Figure 26.1  The Dublin Spectator, 18 March 1768 (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin)

particular Family [the Churchills], and in short, a War of the General [Marlborough] and the Ministry [Whigs, headed by Robert Walpole], and not of the Prince or People. (Foot 1984: 300) In Ireland, where he long resided, Swift’s Drapier’s Letters, written 1724–25, attacked the English government for a scheme to supply Ireland with copper halfpence and farthings, a debased coinage. Published in the Dublin Weekly Journal, Ireland’s first literary publication (1725–52), it contained the subsequently celebrated phrase ‘am I a Free man in England and do I become a Slave in six Hours by crossing the Channel?’ (4 August 1724). In 1726, in Gulliver’s Travels, an allegory of the rebellion of the city of Lindalino against the flying island of Laputa, he evoked the affair: Lindalino represented Dublin and the impositions of Laputa represented the British imposition of the debased coinage. Swift, while spending more time in Ireland as Dean of St Patrick’s Cathedral, Dublin, than some of his fellow Irish colleagues (such as Richard Steele and the dramatist George Farquhar,

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whose careers were made in London), became a celebrity, albeit controversial, in both capitals (Damrosch 2013). With his godson, the popular Irish actor Thomas Sheridan, he produced a weekly paper, the Intelligencer (1728–29). But it was in London, in Tory circles and as a close friend of Alexander Pope, that he truly excelled. In practising various styles, many talented writers in early British ­journalism – S ­ wift, Pope, Fielding and Johnson among ­them – ­owed much to the authors of antiquity. Pope gained fame through his translations of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Satire, in various forms, was much practised. The gentle satire of Horace was perhaps the least imitated. Swift practised both the Horatian and Juvenalian styles. He used at least three Menippean satirical conventions in Gulliver’s Travels – the fantastic, the metamorphosis and the madman theme. His London publisher, Benjamin Motte, cut certain passages from his anti-­Whig satire. Swift critiques his own world by imagining an utopia. In the battle between the ancients and the moderns that raged across the literary world in several European countries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Swift sided with the ancients in his Full and True Account of the Battle fought last Friday between the Ancient and the Modern Books in St. James’s Library (1704), following his early mentor, Sir William Temple, while Pope supported the moderns. Verbal battles and polemics, involving prominent figures, seemed a literary norm. Pope’s The Dunciad (1728–43, three versions) and Fielding’s ‘paper wars’ (1752–53) were highlights. Pope recklessly (fearing attack, he carried pistols), Fielding determinedly, triggered off furores. Pope’s Dunciad lambasted Grub Street scribblers, naming some, contending that bad criticism does greater harm than bad writing. A vendetta ensued: the critic John Dennis (1658–1734), known for his vanity, detected an ironic and veiled portrait of himself in The Dunciad and was furious at what he considered the impudence of the younger author. Dennis hated Pope for the rest of his life, and, save for a temporary reconciliation, dedicated his efforts to insulting him in print, to which Pope responded in kind, making Dennis the butt of his satire. Pope’s main target was the Whig politician Robert Walpole, the first-­ ever prime minister (1721–42), pilloried also by Swift. Swift, Pope and other Tory writers formed the Scriblerus Club; it satirised ignorance and pedantry via the fictional scholar Martinus Scriblerus. Pope also befriended the Whig writers Joseph Addison and Richard Steele. The political climate softened somewhat following the death of Queen Anne in 1714, the accession of the Hanoverians, and the Whig ascendancy which lasted almost fifty years.

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the press in literature and drama 581 Monthly magazines, developed in the 1730s, helped widen the range of subjects tackled, and papers discussed the difficulty of trying to satisfy readers with different tastes and interests. Meanwhile, across the Irish Sea, ‘Martha Love-­Rule’ in the Dublin Weekly Journal also targeted women, and inspired the poem (1726): ‘Arbuckle writes in Weekly Journal / How Phoebus rose and set diurnal, /. . . And mixes true news with what’s Spurious, / To please the Ignorant, and Curious. / Yet after all this Stir and Pother, / The Journal soon becomes Bumfodder’. And Dublin, too, had a ‘paper war’ in 1749: during a bitter election campaign, polemics ranged between the Censor Extraordinary, the Tickler and the Alarm Bell. Henry Fielding’s final novel, Amelia (1751), led to yet further ‘paper wars’. He considered that Amelia occasionally recalled Homer and Virgil. In contrast, a review in the London Magazine claimed that there were too many anachronisms. It mentioned Amelia’s nose: Fielding ‘should have taken care to have had Amelia’s nose so compleatly cured, and set to rights, after it being beat all to pieces, by the help of some eminent surgeon, that not so much as a scar remained’ (December 1751). His adversary John Hill claimed that the book’s title character ‘could charm the World without the Help of a Nose’ (London Daily Advertiser, 8 January 1752). Fielding riposted ironically in the Covent-Garden Journal: a famous Surgeon, who absolutely cured one Mrs Amelia Booth, of a violent Hurt in her Nose, insomuch, that she had scarce a Scar left on it, intends to bring Actions against several ill-­meaning and slanderous People, who have reported that the said Lady had no Nose, merely because the Author of her History, in a Hurry, forgot to inform his Readers of that Particular. (11 January 1752; see Sabor 2007: 102) Authors, including Tobias Smollett and Samuel Richardson, attacked Amelia. Others defended Fielding, who himself brought Amelia before an imaginary ‘Court of Censorial Enquiry’, placing his critics on trial. Leading London playhouses were paid by papers for the privilege of printing their playbills in advance, and performances and texts of the play were often advertised together. Theatres enjoyed pride of place in advertisements, which had developed since the mid-­1600s. The term ‘playbill’ – a bill or placard announcing a p ­ lay – w ­ as recorded in 1673. Henry Woodfall (1739–1805), proprietor of the General Advertiser, closely connected to the theatrical world, announced that companies and their productions ‘will be advertised in this paper only’ (Fox Bourne [1887] 1998, I: 142). Newspapers contracted with theatres

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for exclusive information, details of the cast, and other production and organisational matters. One year Woodfall paid the playhouses in Drury Lane and Covent Garden £64 8s 6d and £66 11s respectively. The word ‘puff ’, possibly taken from the name of German philosopher Samuel von Puffendorf, found echoes in Fielding. In his paper the Champion (February 1740), he writes that his ‘Samuel Puffendorff ’ proclaims himself elected ‘Puff-­Master ­General . . . ­of Great Britain’. Anticipating government ‘public relations’, Fielding wrote of ‘ministerial puffs’ practising an analogy with publishers’ blurbs and trade advertising. ‘Puff ’ was the central figure in The Critic (1779) by the Irish dramatist and parliamentarian Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1751–1816). Described as the ‘author of a new tragedy in rehearsal at Drury-­Lane theatre, a gentleman well-­known in the theatrical world’, Puff ’s vanity and capacity for self-­promotion are limitless. He lists the different types of puff: Yes, sir, puffing is of various sorts: the principal are the puff d ­ irect – ­the puff p ­ reliminary – t­he puff collateral –the puff collusive, and the puff oblique, or puff by implication. These all assume, as circumstances require, the various forms of Letter to the ­Editor – ­Occasional ­Anecdote – ­Impartial ­Critique – ­Observation from Correspondent, or Advertisement from the Party. Puffing excited satire. The opening of The Critic has a character, ‘Dangle’, dismissing naval ­ news – ­ France was then threatening to invade ­Britain – a­ nd affirming ‘I hate all politics but theatrical politics. Where’s the Morning Chronicle?’ Mrs Dangle – ‘That’s your gazette’. Dangle – ‘So, here we have it. “Theatrical intelligence extraordinary”.’ And as the dialogue proceeds between ‘Dangle’ and ‘Puff ’, the latter exemplifies all the above-­mentioned puffs. Publicity and promotion resonated with the age. Fifteen of the twenty-­four columns of the fifth issue of the Morning Post were devoted to advertisements; what Puff says in The Critic probably stemmed from the superior style in which auctions were advertised in the Morning Post. In the later eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson (1709–84), conversationalist, poet, essayist, lexicographer (his Dictionary of the English Language, 1755, long remained the pre-­eminent reference dictionary), translator, journalist, publisher, moralist and literary critic, dwarfed most of his contemporaries. His essays in the Idler – he wrote 91 of its 103 essays, with one composed in half an hour according to his biographer James ­Boswell – ­were published in the London weekly the Universal Chronicle between 1758 and 1760, and

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the press in literature and drama 583 in the Rambler (1750s). He commented on journalists and the press. Nuggets include: He that is known to contribute to a periodical work, needs no other caution than not to tell what particular pieces are his own; such secrecy is indeed very difficult; but if it can be maintained, it is scarcely to be imagined at how small an expense he may grow considerable. (The Idler, 22 April 1758) Envisaging that essayists might lack amusing topics, Johnson explains that he writes to bring relief to his fellow idlers and others ‘who awake in the morning, vacant of thought, with minds gaping for the intellectual food, which some kind essayist has been accustomed to supply’ (The Idler, 29 April 1758). The critic was assailed: much mischief is done in the world with very little interest or design. He that assumes the character of a critick, and justifies his claim by perpetual censure, imagines that he is hurting none but the author, and him he considers as a pestilent animal, whom every other being has a right to persecute; little does he think how many harmless men he involves in his own guilt, by teaching them to be noxious without malignity, and to repeat objections which they do not understand; or how many honest minds he debars from pleasure, by exciting an artificial fastidiousness, and making them too wise to concur with their own sensations. He who is taught by a critick to dislike that which pleased him in his natural state, has the same reason to complain of his instructor, as the madman to rail at his doctor, who, when he thought himself master of Peru, physicked him to poverty. (The Idler, 29 April 1758) Johnson bemoans the repetitiveness of news coverage. He suggests that, instead of announcing an event all at once and then rehashing it endlessly, newspaper writers should reveal the story gradually to keep readers entertained. Thus journals are daily multiplied without increase of knowledge. The tale of the morning paper is told again in the evening, and the narratives of the evening are bought again in the morning. These repetitions, indeed, waste time, but they do not shorten it. The most eager peruser of news is tired before he has completed his labour; and many a man, who enters the coffee-­house in his nightgown and slippers, is called away to his shop, or his dinner,

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before he has well considered the state of Europe. (Scheme for news-writers, The Idler, 27 May 1758) Journalists’ qualities included ‘contempt of shame and indifference to truth’. Wartime facilitates them: among the calamities of war may be justly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates, and credulity encourages. A peace will equally leave the warriour and relater of wars destitute of employment; and I know not whether more is to be dreaded from streets filled with soldiers accustomed to plunder, or from garrets filled with scribblers accustomed to lie. (The Idler, 11 November 1758) In 1763 Johnson invited the Anglo-­Irish poet and playwright Oliver Goldsmith (1728–74) to become a founder-­ member of his club. Returning from the Continent in 1756, at a time of growing print culture, Goldsmith agreed with Ralph Griffiths, editor of the Monthly Review, that for £100 a year, and board and lodgings above the shop, Goldsmith would write reviews from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. daily. As a ‘hack’, he signed reviews as a ‘foreign correspondent’ from his garret, protesting against the commercialisation of letters. The London Times (then named the Daily Universal Register) appeared in 1785, beginning its rise as a ‘journal of record’, and acquiring a reputation for dispassionate, well-­informed reporting; it sold a little under 3,000 copies a day in 1801, reportedly the highest circulation of the dailies. Its staff included men of letters, such as Henry Crabb Robinson, also one of its first foreign correspondents. In 1785, however, the poet George Crabbe (1754–1832) criticised the press, in a poem entitled ‘Newspaper’, as inimical to literature, especially poetry, in ‘a time like this, a bustling busy t­ ime . . . ­where party pens a wordy war maintain . . .; A master passion is the love of news . . .’, thus echoing sentiments already expressed in the 1600s. The final decades of the eighteenth century witnessed the impact of the American and French revolutions on the English and Irish press. The pamphleteer Tom Paine (1737–1809) influenced both. Just as Milton’s Areopagatica was translated by the early French revolutionary leader Mirabeau, so American and French proclamations of press freedom and other liberties resonated with English and Irish authors. ‘Bliss it was in that dawn to be alive / But to be young was very heaven’, wrote the young William Wordsworth. In Belfast, the 24 August 1793 edition of the Northern Star carried details of the Constitution of the French Republic, promulgated on 4 August.

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case study 22 : ben jonson 585 Caricaturists such as James Gillray savaged both George III and the French Revolution. During the period 1640–1800, the English Civil Wars, Queen Anne’s reign (1702–14) and the late 1700s proved key moments in the history of the press and, on occasion, of literary expression. For many decades, periodicals, including newspapers, appeared offshoots of book publishing (even the founder of The Times, John Walter, was primarily a printer) but they gradually emerged as distinct entities. Papers wrote of impartiality, an aim rarely achieved, for accurate news-­reporting remained a lofty ideal and news-­manipulation often trumphed. Satire, polemic and discursive essays were the hallmarks of the press.

Case Study 22: Ben Jonson’s Staple of News and News from the New World Discovered in the Moon Michael Palmer Ben Jonson’s satire of news and journalists, primarily in The Staple of News (1626), inaugurated a vein of humour that had many subsequent echoes across various art forms. The Staple, which also lampoons avarice, was little performed, but it and Jonson’s other productions from the late 1610s caught the then vogue of news publications, corantos, avvisi, gazettas, flourishing in various European ports and cities, stimulated by conflicts across the continent, notably the Thirty Years War (1618–48). Chit-­ chat and rumour, the unlikely and the reliable, commerce meaning conversation and commerce meaning buying and selling all figure in The Staple; printers and newsmen exploit the thirst for news, and even envisage monopolising its control and sale. For her vicar, a countrywoman wants to buy a ‘groat’ worth’s of news, its content immaterial. London venues, such as St Paul’s, where news was collected and newsmongers thrived, loom large. Here, as elsewhere, Jonson pinpoints fame, however transient it might prove; allusions to recent events (such as Charles I’s coronation, 2 February 1626) abound. The Staple of News was a topical satire on newsmongering before the advent of the newspaper. In the masque News from the New World Discovered in the Moon (1620), Jonson ridicules the nascent news industry while celebrating the invention of the telescope, which brought the far-­off moon close-­up. Jonson is often concerned with how the news distracts from ascertaining the truth: ‘we only hunt for novelty, not truth’; ‘expectation of the vulgar is more drawn and held with newness than goodness’. Elsewhere, like other sovereigns, King ­James – ­the monarch with whom Jonson had the greatest ­affinity – ­held that ‘the vulgar’ were not, via newsbooks and the like, to be informed of the affairs of state.

Chapter Twenty-­seven

INFORMATIONAL ABUNDANCE AND MATERIAL ABSENCE IN THE DIGITISED EARLY MODERN PRESS: THE CASE FOR CONTEXTUAL DIGITISATION Paul Gooding

Introduction The Great Plague of London, which ran from 1665 to 1666, was the last major occurrence of the bubonic plague in England, and simultaneously one of the first to be reported in newspapers. News reports updated readers about outbreaks, provided weekly death tolls and carried announcements of public mitigations. The Intelligencer of 21 August 1665, for instance, printed a Crown Proclamation prohibiting the keeping of the Bartholomew and Stourbridge Fairs on public health grounds: Whereby His Majesty out of His Princely and Christian Care to His loving Subjects; and that no good means of Providence may be neglected to stay the further spreading of the great infection of the Plague, doth find it necessary to prevent all occasions of publick concourse of His People for the present, till it shall please Almighty God to remove the said infection. (The Intelligencer Published for the Satisfaction and Information of the People, 21 August 1665, 2) While this chapter is not strictly about pandemics, the similarly dramatic curtailments to civic life caused by the novel virus Covid-­19 have given cause to reassess things that many of us have taken for granted, including access to the historical press. The first cases of 586

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informational abundance and material absence 587 Covid-­19 were recorded in Wuhan, China, in December 2019. Despite local lockdowns, the virus spread internationally, and the World Health Organisation declared a global pandemic on 11 March 2020. Less than two weeks later, all the governments of the United Kingdom imposed a stay-­at-­home order banning public gatherings until further notice. All sectors were affected, with libraries and archives closing their doors from 26 March 2020. Organisations were forced to pivot to digital-­first delivery of collections and services (Day 2020), with digitised collections providing some continuity of access for users. This brought into sharp focus the extent to which digitisation has made historical artefacts accessible online; as Adam Smith (2020: 110) notes, there is a certain irony in the fact that eighteenth-­century print culture enjoyed greater accessibility during the pandemic than modern, in-­copyright publications. However, the shift to online-­only access exacerbated huge inequalities in access to digitised collections and digital infrastructures (Terras et al. 2021: 11) and confirmed that ‘standardised and rigid’ large-­scale digitisation practices (Prescott and Hughes 2018) were inadequate to support the whole range of user needs. This chapter will address that tension between the informational abundance of the digitised early modern press on the one hand, and the limited forms of usage that our digital collections afford on the other. Many digital resources for the historical press are what I call ‘large-­ scale digitised collections’ (LSDCs), a term adopted from Karen Coyle’s (2006) work on mass digitisation. LSDCs are resources that seek to digitise, make discoverable and link specific large library and archival collections rather than whole libraries. They exist as part of an age of online abundance for historians (Rosenzweig 2003; Milligan 2019: 7–8). Abundance, and particularly remote access, has proven transformational for research in history and the digital humanities. Furthermore, the large-­scale translation of historical artefacts into machine-­readable data has made them amenable to computer-­assisted research methods. However, despite such informational abundance, the workflows of large-­scale digitisation largely ignore the material aspects of the historical press. This limits what is ‘afforded’ by LSDCs, in line with Geismar’s definition of affordance in museums: An affordance is the interaction between an object, its user and its environment, all of which determine the possibility of its use. This is also fundamentally a contextual approach demanding an understanding of two scales (the social and the material). (Geismar 2018: 43)

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The affordances of large-­scale digitisation are largely informational, in that they aid discovery of textual information via search interfaces (Gooding 2017: 173). However, researchers increasingly require access to the data behind the search box (Whitelaw 2015), in order to reuse information such as newspaper full text, metadata and images, in data-­rich research into the historical press. In recent years, content providers have responded to this need with the creation of online portals for open cultural heritage datasets (e.g. Ames 2021), the preparation and release of public domain data (e.g. National Library of New Zealand 2021) and metadata (e.g. Ryan and McKernan 2021), and the creation of library and archive labs to support experimental research with digital collections and data (e.g. Mahey et al. 2019). Librarians, archivists and researchers have therefore begun to come to terms with the implications of harnessing collections as data (Padilla et al. 2019). The historical press has been a particular focus of data-­rich analysis, afforded by both large-­scale digitisation and improved availability of historical newspaper data. This chapter explores how the ‘aura of information’ (Betancourt 2006) that surrounds LSDCs is inextricably linked with data-­ rich research into the historical press. First, it will address the scope and range of digitised resources available for the early modern period and illustrate how large-­scale digitisation has afforded new forms of historical research. Second, it will illustrate the growth of materialist analysis of the digitised press, an emerging area of research that I will argue is largely ignored in digitisation practices. Finally, I will consider the potential implications of materialist research for digitisation practices. In doing so, I will address the following question: how might we account for the absence of material context in large-­scale digitised collections of the early modern news?

Digitised Resources for the Early Modern Press in the UK and Ireland British and Irish newspapers have been extensively digitised in recent decades. Prototype digitisation projects emerged in the late 1990s and early 2000s, but a significant increase in the pace and scale of newspaper digitisation had occurred by 2008, when two LSDCs taken from the British Library collections were launched by Gale Cengage: the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Newspaper Collection (henceforth Burney Collection), which provided approximately one million pages of early modern newspapers; and British Library Nineteenth Century Newspapers, numbering approximately

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informational abundance and material absence 589 two million pages of nineteenth-­century materials in 2007, supplemented in 2010 by an extra one million pages. Both resources are aimed at academic audiences, and JISC initially provided access to UK education providers via a national agreement. In the years since, an agreement between the British Library and Brightsolid has allowed nearly 45 million additional pages to be digitised and made available via the British Newspaper Archive to individual and library customers (British Newspaper Archive 2021a). UK national libraries have also undertaken digitisation projects to make newspaper collections freely available: Welsh Newspapers Online was launched in 2013 by the National Library of Wales, making approximately one million pages of Welsh newspapers accessible; while the British Library Heritage Made Digital project aims to digitise and make available materials that are under-­represented in their online collections. In 2021 the British Library made roughly one million newspaper pages ‘free to view’ (British Newspaper Archive 2021b) via the British Newspaper Archive. The wide-­ranging impacts of these rapidly expanding digitised archives have been addressed by several researchers (Marshall and Hume 2010; Brake 2012; Mussell 2012c; Gooding 2017; Prescott 2018; Beals and Bell 2020; Hauswedell et al. 2020). While the early modern era has not been ignored, the nineteenth century has received the most scholarly attention in work on the digitised news. This matches the archival footprint of each era: our surviving record of the early modern news is several degrees of magnitude smaller than that of the nineteenth-­century press. However, this also means that, at least proportionally, its digitisation to date is much more extensive. The British Library catalogue of its British and Irish newspaper holdings in 2019 (Ryan and McKernan 2021) lists approximately 25,000 unique titles. Roughly 60 per cent of the 940 titles published before 1801 have been digitised and made available via the Burney Collection or the British Newspaper Archive. By contrast, just 6 per cent of the 23,983 titles published since 1801 have been digitised. While this is a slightly rough and ready calculation, ignoring as it does title changes, condition and copyright status, it shows that scholars of the early modern news have been proportionally well served by digitisation in recent years. The typological diversity and geographical distribution of collections relating to early modern news mean that there is no single resource to which researchers can turn. Digitised collections establish formal boundaries, encompass discrete archival collections, or provide broad coverage of resources from one or more collection-­holding institutions. Broadside ballads, which were closely integrated into newsbook and

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pamphlet culture in the mid-­to-­late sixteenth century, demonstrate the fragmentation of the digitised archive. The surviving broadside archive is held across more than twenty libraries and archives worldwide (McShane 2017: 283). Several free digitised broadside collections exist online, dating back to the launch of Broadside Ballads Online by the Bodleian Library in 1999. The English Broadside Ballad Archive, managed by the Early Modern Center in the English Department of the University of California, makes accessible several important broadside collections held in North America and the United Kingdom; ‘The Word on the Street’, from the National Library of Scotland, provides nearly 1,800 Scottish broadsides from 1650 to 1910; and English Crime and Execution Broadsides, managed by Harvard University Library, provides highlights of nearly 600 broadsides covering crime and capital punishment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. All provide their materials under a Creative Commons licence, thus facilitating broad reuse of their collections, and all are much smaller in scale than the commercial LSDCs produced by libraries and their partners. National libraries have in many cases fostered public–private partnerships to digitise their collections at scale. Many are paywalled, some are openly available, but each represents a defined collection drawn from a library collection and utilises, where possible, rigid semi-­ automated methods of digitisation and metadata creation to support online discovery and reading for digitised resources (Gooding 2017: 4–5). News media form just one part of many LSDCs that cover the early modern era. Eighteenth Century Journals by Adam Matthews Digital brings together rare journals published between c. 1685 and 1835, addressing many aspects of social, political and creative life. Similarly, British Periodicals from ProQuest provides full-­run coverage of approximately 500 titles published between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. Several LSDCs limit themselves to materials that can be defined as newspapers by common characteristics of ‘seriality, periodicity, consecutive numbering and a stable title’ (Raymond 2003: 107). The Burney Collection from Gale comprises nearly one million pages of pre-­1801 newspapers across approximately 1,300 titles, drawn from a print collection that owes its roots to the personal collection of Revd Charles Burney (1757–1817). Gale also provides the 17th and 18th Century Nichols Newspapers Collection, containing 296 volumes of bound news media held by the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. The personal collection of author and printer John Nichols (1745–1826) forms the basis of the resource, which fills many gaps in the Burney

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informational abundance and material absence 591 Collection. Both are included in Gale Historical Newspapers, an aggregated discovery platform that makes Gale’s digitised newspaper resources available to subscribers via a single search. Determining the extent of digitisation for the Irish press is not simple, as Marie-­Louise Coolahan notes: ‘not all [digital resources] are self-­evidently Irish-­ focused resources; early modern Ireland was a multilingual, contested place’ (2020: 176). However, The Irish Newspaper Archives represent the largest digitised collection of Irish news, spanning over six million pages covering Ireland north and south from 1738 to the present day. This sample of digitised resources for early modern news media shows the complex, fragmented status of online access. The situation has improved in recent years, but from the perspective of researchers who often desire comprehensive coverage it remains unsatisfactory. That said, the increased availability of free datasets, the presence of Application Programming Interfaces and on-­request access to data from commercial providers, alongside increasing recognition of the status of library and archival collections as data (Padilla et al. 2019), means that researchers can more easily utilise the informational affordances of the digitised news. The same features that make digitised newspapers amenable to online search also suit the application of computational methods: the presence of full-­text transcripts via optical character recognition; the availability of machine- and human-­ readable metadata; and the fact that digitised content is well suited to numerical and computational analysis. This has led many historians to explore the possibilities of the digital humanities and data science for expanding our knowledge of the historical press. The following section will present several projects that demonstrate how the informational affordances of digitised newspapers can support new forms of research.

Computer-­assisted Approaches to the Digitised Press A shift in historical research has occurred in the last decade. Marshall and Hume (2010: 8) noted that eighteenth-­century newspapers had generally been used as sources for ‘things like obituaries, occasional citations of reviews of books and p ­ lays . . . ­and advertisements for books, theatre, opera and concert performances’. They recognised that digitised collections were causing ‘tectonic shifts’ (2010: 52) in research, and this can be most clearly seen in the growing scale and ambition of projects that apply computer-­assisted methods to creating and analysing digitised newspaper data. Cultural heritage organisations and researchers have collaborated to address questions

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that arise when working on data at scale, formalised around several overlapping challenges including connecting trans-­modal digital collections; addressing problematic and biased language in catalogue descriptions; enriching archival description via standards such as the International Image Interoperability Framework; the selection, implementation and use of persistent identifiers; the application of machine learning and artificial intelligence to improve access and discoverability; the role of public participation in enhancing and understanding collections; and the preservation and sharing of born-­digital artefacts. Alongside this work, which has been funded by schemes such as the AHRC-­funded Towards a National Collection (2020) programme, researchers have worked on developing new methods for harnessing digitised collections in research. For instance, Living with Machines (2021) is a large-­scale project to harness digitised collections to illuminate the effects of the mechanisation of work practices in the long nineteenth century. It is indicative of an interdisciplinary approach to research with digitised collections, combining a clear historical research question with topics that span data science, computational science, information science and the digital humanities: representativeness, balance and bias in source data, georeferencing and lexicon expansion, applications of computer vision, public crowdsourcing and shared technical infrastructure development. Questions relating to the increased scale of the digitised archive are thus formalised in a clear research agenda that spans the historical, the curatorial and the technological. For instance, the ability to apply geographical metadata to full-­text newspapers has supported research into networks of news transmission. The Oceanic Exchanges project, led by Melodee Beals and Emily Bell (2020), harnesses computational approaches to study ‘patterns of information flow across national and linguistic boundaries’. The team builds upon previous research into textual reappearance and attribution in newspapers (e.g. Cordell and Mullen 2017; Beals 2018; Ryan 2018) to derive insights into transatlantic sharing of news, and to produce metadata maps that support comparison of data across different collections. The projects mentioned in this chapter represent a small subset of the work that arises from the informational nature of the digitised news: highly interdisciplinary research that seeks to make digitised collections more amenable to computational analysis, address issues of bias and representation in the digitised record, improve discoverability and linking, and develop infrastructures to support and sustain these activities. Such projects are vital and foundational to our

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informational abundance and material absence 593 understanding of digitised materials as a new intellectual medium. Significant challenges clearly remain that emphasise the importance of ongoing research: LSDCs remain beset by poor-­quality scans and OCR accuracy rates often lower than 50 per cent (Christy et al. 2017: 2), and difficulties exist in applying named entity recognition to early modern documents (Humbel et al. 2021). However, these projects are inevitably defined and shaped by focusing their critical lens upon the growing scale of digitised resources. Far less attention has been paid to understanding online historical collections as more than a merely informational resource. As a result, despite the formal heterogeneity of the early modern press, questions of materiality, context and artefactuality are severely under-­investigated. Abundance does not equate to comprehensiveness, and so any given digitised collection exists, partially, as an account of the curatorial decisions that shaped it. The decisions made by previous generations of library and archival professionals have major implications for both the physical and digital manifestation of historical collections. This can shape factors including conservation and binding of physical newspapers, the organisational scheme used for a specific collection, the provenance of single items in a collection, or the decision to digitise from microform or original print holdings. That context is not always evident in digitised resources; Michel Betancourt (2006) describes the ‘separation of the meaning present in a work from the physical representation of that work’ as the ‘aura of information’. However, in recent years, several researchers have sought to address this absence, providing histories of digitised resources that are situated within a broader network of meaning that encompasses technology, creation, curation and reception. Because LSDCs often retain the scope of existing library and archival collections, the digitised record reflects things that may seem arbitrary without explanation. Andrew Prescott’s in-­depth account of the Burney Collection, for instance, provides evidence to support the argument that ‘in many ways the name Burney Newspapers is more of a homage to the founder of the collection than an accurate indication of their provenance’ (Prescott 2018: 53). Several factors contribute to undermine the cohesiveness of the Burney Collection as a representation of Burney’s original private collection: that curators continued to insert purchased newspapers into the collection until the 1970s, meaning that approximately two-­thirds of volumes were added after its acquisition (Goff 2007); that Burney newspapers published after 1800 were transferred to the British Museum’s newspaper library at Colindale on its opening in 1932; that British Museum curators

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changed from Burney’s own day-­by-­day arrangement to sequential title-­based shelving; that the majority of Burney’s provincial newspapers were removed; and that the digitised collection is presented largely as bi-­tone scans of microfilm copies, rather than the original newspapers. As a result, the Burney Collection can appear London-­ centric and time-­bounded to a greater degree than the original collection. None of this is evident from the Burney Collection website, and some of the limited information that is available is inaccurate. The ‘about’ page of the resource, for instance, reports that the collection was ‘gathered by Reverend Charles Burney’, despite the huge amount of material that was inserted after his death (Goff 2007; Prescott 2018).

Materialist Accounts of the Digitised Press While LSDCs, informational in nature as they are, do not always provide accurate material, curatorial and technical information, such information is available in the form of individual published papers. Prescott’s account of the Burney Collection draws on Moira Goff ’s (2007) valuable overview of the history and constitution of the collection. Several historians have similarly sought to address the absence of material history in the digitised record. Some position their work in relation to traditional humanistic fields such as bibliography, book history, manuscript studies and literary criticism (Mak 2014: 1515), while others place it explicitly within a media archaeological frame (Fyfe 2016: 551) that engages with broader communication structures. Both bodies of work adopt Foucault’s (1972) definition of archaeology as a method for excavating the discursive practices associated with the creation, curation and reception of systems of thought and knowledge. The disciplinary breadth of material historical archaeology reflects Erkki Huhtamo and Jussi Parikka’s argument that media archaeology is not a single approach but a banner term for several closely related approaches that seek to ‘excavate’ media-­cultural phenomena: ‘media archaeology rummages textual, visual, and auditory archives as well as collections of artifacts, emphasising both the discursive and the material manifestations of culture’ (Huhtamo and Parikka 2011: 3). Digitised culture represents a convergence of cultural artefacts, human practices and technological process that can be conducive to archaeological approaches. Bonnie Mak’s archaeological reading of Early English Books Online, for instance, investigates how digitised resources are generated, circulated and received. Mak argues that a

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informational abundance and material absence 595 digitised object refers to, and often transmits, signs of the various circumstances that influence its transmission: ‘such ­clues – ­paratextual and peritextual, formal and m ­ aterial – m ­ ay be drawn together and scrutinized to develop a more nuanced understanding of that digitization and its politics, for it is within such an infrastructure that meaning is made’ (Mak 2014: 1515). Materialist approaches have been applied to both the early modern era and the historical press more generally. In addition to Prescott’s history of the Burney Collection, Angela McShane (2017: 282–3) applies Mak’s approach to digital resources for broadside ballads, to explore the ‘ontological rift’ between the diverse material forms of the ballad as object, and the digitised ballad archive as entity. Beyond the early modern period, Paul Fyfe has written an archaeology of British Nineteenth Century Newspapers, a digital resource that is jointly produced by the British Library and Gale Cengage. Fyfe links the digitised form of the nineteenth-­century press to the poorly documented corporate history of those organisations that have exercised bibliographic control over it. Fyfe describes the article as an attempt to ‘­outline – ­and then ­pursue – a­ method for investigating these material histories, an “archaeology” of data, to better grasp the historiography of our research objects’ (2016: 546). Ryan Cordell (2017), by excavating the history of OCR-­derived text, opens the possibility of applying historiographical approaches to the technologies of digitisation as well as the artefacts. Cordell seeks to uncover the relationship between OCR text and the original technologies of microfilm and text from which the digitised record is captured. In each case there is a desire to make visible material and human contexts, in order to better understand the material conditions under which key digital resources were created. Questions of authenticity, provenance, technology, remediation and human labour are applied to previously informational resources, thereby illuminating the encompassing infrastructures of meaning making (Mak 2014: 1515). Work of this nature represents a reassertion of materiality as a defining characteristic of digitised artefacts. To date, though, the insights derived from these archaeologies are yet to be applied by library practitioners to large-­scale digitisation practices. We are thus due a re-­evaluation of the technical and conceptual underpinnings of large-­scale digitisation that addresses the full range of its possible affordances. Cordell provides an intentionally non-­exhaustive list of aspects of the digitised archive that are ‘to some extent, at least, knowable and describable’ (2017: 214), which could easily double as a list of details that are currently absent from LSDCs:

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Just as details of type, ink, or paper, or paratext such as printer’s records can help us to establish the histories under which a print book was created, details of format, interface, and even grant proposals can help us to establish the histories of corpora created under conditions of mass digitisation. (Cordell 2017: 214) While each historiography contributes deeply to our understanding of the digitised archive, there remains a need for us to reconsider how the digitisation and presentation of resources might combine the transformational affordances of the press as large-­scale data source with its material and curatorial past. The case study at the end of this chapter explores how the absence of para- and peri-­textual evidence for digitised news from the early modern period harms our ability to meaningfully engage with questions of materiality and provenance.

Conclusion: Towards Contextual Digitisation for Historical Newspapers The fields of history and information science continue to come to terms with the implications of digitisation for research and professional practices, not least in theorising the distinction between a physical artefact and its digitised surrogate. Significant investment has gone into digitising the historical archive, relying largely on high throughput large-­scale digitisation techniques that have successfully met research demands for more content online. As I noted in 2017, most users of digitised newspapers prioritise access to large quantities of resources online and rely on search and filtering technologies to find what they want. The resultant focus on informational content underpins vital search, retrieval and reading affordances. This has subsequently supported the growth of interdisciplinary research that engages with questions of scale in the digitised historical record and utilises the informational aspects of digitisation to great effect. The immense scale of newspaper digitisation, covering the early modern period onwards, has placed research utilising the historical press at the forefront of this new direction. However, there has been too little recognition of the material histories of the digitised press. Digitisation has been undertaken from microfilm, rather than original print newspapers, limiting scanned images to bi-­tone black and white and removing much of the rich physical detail that advanced digitisation technologies aim to replicate. As a result, our large-­scale digitised newspaper collections carry an aura of information that serves certain users to better effect than others.

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informational abundance and material absence 597 Andrew Prescott and Lorna Hughes argue that ‘too often digitization is treated as a form of color microfilm, thereby offering distorted views of the manuscript and making it appear to be a simple and more stable object than it really is’ (Prescott and Hughes 2018). They advocate for a new ethos of ‘slow digitisation’ that prioritises the development of technological and critical tools to excavate the layers of meaning within historical manuscripts. This admirable ethos, incorporating advanced imaging technologies, seems highly suited to the digitisation of small-­scale collections of material, or individual manuscripts, and there is certainly space for applying slow digitisation techniques to specific newspaper titles of interest. However, at present, scale remains the defining feature of digitised newspapers; while we should not be so arrogant as to assume that large-­scale digitised scans represent a terminal form for the news, given the complex history of newspaper remediation, we can be confident that tens of millions of pages will not be rescanned any time soon. As Paul Conway argues, the stark choice we face in addressing the provenance and materiality of digitised news therefore seems not much choice at all: ‘accept these digital surrogates as new intellectual products, rather than as “faithful copies,” or re-­ digitize a substantial portion of the world’s research libraries’ holdings of books and serials to create cleaner and more pristine representations of volumes’ (Conway 2013: 27). Furthermore, while improved scanning technologies, or redigitising newspapers from print rather than microfilm, could certainly support a richer sense of materiality, McShane (2017: 294) rightly warns that ‘historical comprehension is an impossible dream for digitisation projects based entirely on the remediation of extant printed objects’. We therefore require a shift in large-­scale digitisation practices towards what I term ‘contextual digitisation’, a professional praxis that positions questions of material, historical and technological contexts alongside automated digitisation processes. Contextual digitisation should, at its core, provide an apparatus by which users can understand the provenance, history, curation and technologies that have served to produce the new intellectual output that is the digitised newspaper. Like scholarly editions, there is no definitive edition of a digitised text, merely different translations that prioritise and emphasise different affordances. LSDCs therefore need to reflect the rich material history of the physical collections from which they originate, alongside the development of the digitised version. The creation of bibliographies of digitised archives (Cordell 2017), based on the available evidence, would contribute to our understanding of LSDCs, while database histories such as those produced by

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the Oceanic Exchanges team (Beals and Bell 2020) provide vital information about the history, digitisation processes and composition of each digitised newspaper collection. At a minimum, digitised resource creators could work with researchers to produce similarly high-­quality database histories that are clearly accessible within the resource. Other solutions for contextual digitisation would vary for each collection, but could include the following: 1. The digitisation and publication of title indexes, card catalogues and administrative documentation for discrete collections. 2. The provision of more detailed contextual metadata for news sources, including but not limited to page size, publisher details and printing locations. 3. Publicly accessible administrative data for LSDCs, including funder details, technologies and workflows, intended user personas and responsible parties. 4. Workflows and technical details for digitisation processes, perhaps as part of a ‘database history’. 5. Transparent presentation of interface decisions, including details of multiple editions of the same issue. None of these would act as a single solution for reintroducing context into the large-­scale digitised newspaper archive, but each would help to support forms of reuse that go beyond the informational affordances of digitisation. Furthermore, while there already exist general accounts of user behaviour with digitised newspapers, further research is required into the needs of scholars engaged in materialist research including media archaeological excavation. This would ensure that contextual digitisation praxis would be developed to prioritise communities whose needs are largely absent in the design of LSDCs. Digitised newspaper collections are important for more than access: they afford new, and potentially transformative, forms of computational research. However, and despite the benefits of abundance that have been delivered by large-­scale digitisation, the formal language of LSDCs is that of an informational resource that prioritises discovery, reading and data reuse over provenance and material, curatorial and technological histories. The forms of research that are afforded by the large-­scale digitised press are limited by digitisation workflows, and by the assumptions that underpin interface and resource design. This absence has been felt particularly acutely since the Covid-­19 pandemic brought with it the realisation that physical collections can become equally inaccessible to us all in a way that transcends existing divides

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case study 23 : the london gazette 599 caused by institutional affiliation, funding and geographical location. A contextual digitisation praxis would begin to expand the opportunities for research and contribute to mitigating the impact of physical inaccessibility. Contextual digitisation would therefore require us to continually reflect upon the following questions: for whom does the large-­scale digitised archive exist, what do they want to do with it, and how should large-­scale digitisation workflows adapt to ensure these needs are met?

Case Study 23: The London Gazette, or Printing the News in a Pandemic Paul Gooding The London Gazette was launched in 1665 as the official journal of record for the English Crown. Due to the timing of the Gazette’s launch, its early publication history was inextricably linked to the Great Plague. Charles II, as a result of the Royal Court relocating from London, ordered that the newspaper be printed at the University of Oxford press. This led its first issue, published on 7  November 1665, to be called the Oxford Gazette. The Oxford printings were produced by Leonard Lichfield (1637–86), whose father had been employed as printer to the University of Oxford and then from 1642 to 1646 had printed the king’s public papers during the Civil War. Lichfield carried on his father’s business, and in 1665 was licensed to print the Oxford Gazette as a folio half-­sheet. It was also reprinted under the same name in London by Thomas Newcombe (1627–1681), who served as King’s Printer to Charles II. The first two issues of the Gazette are absent from the Burney Collection, which starts from the third issue, 20–23 November 1665. However, scans of the first issue of the Gazette are currently available on two different websites: the first is the official website of the Gazette, where a complete run has been digitised and made available. Issue 1 is discoverable via full-­text search, with the option to view online or download a full bi-­tone scan. The official copy digitised by the Gazette carries the following imprint: ‘Oxon, Printed by Leonard Litchfield, and Reprinted at London, for the use of some Merchants and Gentlemen, who desire them’ (The Oxford Gazette, 7 November 1665, 2). The second version available online comes from the website of a collector, in the form of images attached to a sales listing. Very few copies of the first issue are understood to be in circulation, but this appears to one of two copies that have come up for sale in the last decade. The first was auctioned by Mullock’s Auction House in 2013, to some interest in the press. However, the images contained in online news reports (e.g. Mail Online 2013) are web-­resolution thumbnails that are neither suitable, nor intended, for historical analysis. The

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second copy, carrying more detailed images, appears on the website of Mark E. Mitchell, an American collector of over 20,000 newspapers dating back to the seventeenth century (‘The Mitchell Archives’ n.d.). Under a blogpost entitled ‘The First Newspaper in History’ are details of the issue, which is listed for sale at $250,000. Several photographs are provided at 72dpi, which is optimal for viewing on a screen but not preservation quality. These photos make visible a degree of detail, including what appears to be a collector’s stamp on p. 1 and handwritten text stating ‘From Monday November 13 to Thursday November 16, 1665’. Close inspection demonstrates typographical differences from the issue on the Gazette website. The imprint contains one such anomaly, reading: ‘Merchants and Gentlemen, who desired [my emphasis] them’. This version also contains printed page numbers, presented in brackets in the centre of each page header. Differences in word spacing and paragraph placement also suggest typesetting variations. The two versions discoverable online, then, are certainly different printings of the same issue. Yet the absence of digitised copies from a recognised scholarly resource makes piecing together these clues time-­consuming and renders the sources extremely vulnerable to loss due to the ephemeral nature of the web. Furthermore, the digitisations provide little context to assist in material analysis: neither version provides an indication of its size, and neither details information about printing. The fragmentary digitised record provides clues about the Gazette’s publication history, but there is no scholarly apparatus to support such an analysis. What happens, though, if we analyse issues from a resource that is aimed at a scholarly audience, such as the Burney Collection? Issue 12 of the Gazette, 21–25 December 1665, provides a useful comparison. Several copies are discoverable online. The first appears on an auctioneer’s website, where it is described as a rarely available Oxford printing of the Gazette. The imprint supports this claim, stating: ‘Oxford. Printed by Leonard Lichfield, Printer to the University, 1665’. The second copy comes from the Gazette website, with a longer imprint that details its reprinting in London, and typographical variations that suggest that it is a separate printing. The third, and most problematic, record is in the Burney Collection. The Gazette was printed on both sides of a half folio sheet, with two columns per page (Glaisyer 2019: 67). However, the version in the Burney Collection is presented in an unusual four-­page format with no explanation. A closer inspection shows that two copies of the issue appear consecutively. These are clearly different, as each copy contains typographical deviations that suggest different printings. There is no associated warning or explanation, nor an indication elsewhere in the LSDC that users might find multiple copies of a single issue. We are therefore left with four scans across three different websites, taken apparently from three printings: the first, a unique version containing an Oxford imprint from the auction website; a

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case study 23 : the london gazette 601 second unique version in the Burney Collection; and two different digitisations of the same printing on the Burney Collection and Gazette websites. Each individual user can piece together clues that are contained in the digitised images, but resource creators could do more to explain the provenance of scans via bibliographic metadata and description. The digitised record represents new, subsidiary editions of historical sources, and requires treating as such through the provision of technical, contextual and descriptive information.

CONCLUDING COMMENTS Nicholas Brownlees

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n a brief personal note, these final words are written with a mixture of relief and gratitude. Relief that we have got to the end of the journey; gratitude to the contributors who have brought the volume home. The main burden of the work was carried out throughout the Covid-­19 pandemic, with all that it entailed, but nevertheless the contributors’ dedication to the volume and its aims was exemplary. There was a unity of purpose that exhilarated the task and informed the contents. What was recognised right from the beginning was that we were taking part in an unique editorial project. This first volume is one of three covering the history of the British and Irish press from its seventeenth-­century beginnings up until the present day. The three volumes amount to over 2,200 pages, more than 100 contributors, 280-­ plus images and a bibliography reaching 45,000 words. It is in many ways an extraordinary achievement, and I, as editor of this volume, cannot but congratulate Edinburgh University Press and the general editors of the series, David Finkelstein and Martin Conboy, for their ambition and enterprise. But it is not just numbers that distinguish the series. Each volume addresses questions related to newspaper and periodical history in the context of general social/political history, cultural history and technological history. These guiding themes require an interdisciplinary array of scholarship which takes time to muster but once together can be very rewarding. In this first volume we have such a global line-­up of experts stretching across not only Britain and Ireland but three different continents. This transnational profile is particularly important, even embodies, what for me is the standout feature of print news and much of the 602

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concluding comments 603 periodical press in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There were neither national nor international press agencies, but so much news and press content passed from one country to another and indeed from one newspaper to another. This interconnectedness was seen in the provincial press which borrowed from the London press, the London press which lifted from European publications, and likewise the Irish, Scottish and early American press which also contained much material previously published elsewhere. The practice of ‘copy and paste’ reigned supreme and it is no wonder that so many seventeenth- and eighteenth-­century newspaper editors were well versed in foreign languages: rather than wait for another newspaper to translate the news you translated it yourself and made the scoop. However, apart from the uniformity of much of the hard news, our period also witnessed an ever-­growing diversification of supplementary material in the press as newspapers and journals started reaching out to more specific constituencies, whether geographical, political, social, cultural or scientific. Our volume has investigated these interrelated strands not only in relation to the dissemination and reception of news, newspapers and generalist magazines in Britain and Ireland, but also with regard to the women’s press, medical journals, literary reviews, and the criminal, political and religious press. Our history is further reinforced by substantive chapters on the business of the press, legal contexts, readers and readerships, the emergence of the journalist as a professional figure, and the materiality and layout of newspapers. The importance of the latter to our understanding of the press explains why we have included so many images of newspapers and periodicals. Visual presentation can be as important a signifier as the text itself. My final words are dedicated to those without whom this volume would not have been possible: the men and women working in the press so many years ago. Did they have any inkling that their lives and work would be studied so assiduously and in such depth? Most likely not, but for their contribution to society’s development they deserve our commendation and thanks.

KEY PRESS AND PERIODICAL EVENTS TIMELINE, 1605–1800

1600–1659 1605 In Europe first weekly printed news-­sheets produced in Strasbourg 1620 (Dec.) First extant English-­language coranto, published in Amsterdam, beginning with the words ‘The new tydings out of Italie are not yet com’ In the masque News from the New World Discovered in the Moon, Ben Jonson ridicules the nascent news industry 1621 First coranto printed in London for ‘N.B’ (probably Nicholas Bourne or Nathaniel Butter, booksellers who dominated the news business of the 1620s and 1630s) 1622 (Oct.) Beginning of serialised weekly press consisting of quarto publications containing foreign news Thomas Gainsford edits corantos until 1624 and through his editorial addresses to the reader provides many insights into the early world of the press 604

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timeline 605 1624 In the serialised press’s first advertisement, the printer announces he will print a map of the siege of Breda though ‘you may not expect this Map this sixe days’ 1626 Ben Jonson’s play The Staple of Newes, satirising news writers and readers, is performed 1632 (Dec.) Corantos publishing foreign news are banned by Star Chamber, a court consisting of royal judges and privy councillors, which had wide discretionary powers 1637 Star Chamber decree requires a copy of every printed book to be deposited in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University 1638 (Dec.) The ban on corantos is lifted 1641 (July) Star Chamber abolished by Parliament (Nov.) Publication of The Heads of Severall Proceedings in this Present Parliament, from the 22 of November to the 29. 1641 starts the newsbook era with news periodicals providing both foreign and domestic news Heads of Severall Proceedings in the Present Parliament and The Diurnal Occurrances, Touching on the dailie proceedings in Parliament (1641–42) published in Edinburgh, though both are reprints of London publications Publication of Tachygraphy, an influential shorthand system developed by Thomas Shelton (1601–50)

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1642 (Aug.) Charles I raises his standard at Nottingham, the official start of the Civil War Publication of anti-­Welsh mock newsbooks and pamphlets in support of Parliament (e.g. Newes from Wales or the Brittish Parliament) 1643 Launch of Mercurius Aulicus (royalist) and Mercurius Britanicus (parliamentarian), two highly partisan and successful newsbooks in the early stages of the Civil War Launch of Samuel Pecke’s revamped A Perfect Diurnall, one of the most accurate and respected newsbooks during the Civil Wars 1644 John Milton’s Areopagitica, an emphatic call for freedom of the press, is published Jane Coe takes over her deceased husband’s printing business and during the next three years is involved in the production of several newsbooks, including Perfect Occurrences, The Moderate Messenger and The Kingdomes Scout 1648 Launch of the Moderate, Gilbert Mabbott’s radical newsbook and mouthpiece of the Levellers 1649 (Jan.) Charles I executed (Sept.) The Rump Parliament passes the Act against ‘Unlicensed and Scandalous Books and Pamphlets, and for better regulating of Printing’, leading to the closure of London newsbooks; they are replaced by two official newsbooks Launch of the Irish Monthly Mercury, a pro-­Cromwell news series aimed at English readers

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timeline 607 1650 Launch of Mercurius Politicus, a weekly government newsbook edited by Marchamont Nedham Launch of Nouvelles ordinaires de Londres, containing British news in French 1651 Mercurius Scoticus, or a true character of Affairs in England, Scotland, Ireland and other Forraign Parts published in Edinburgh though not generally considered to be the first Scottish periodical, since its editor was English and it was written principally for an English readership John Milton appointed Official Censor 1652 First coffee house in London opened at St Michael’s Alley, off Cornhill 1654 John Crouch’s mock newsbook Mercurius Fumigosus satirises the world of news 1655 Launch of The Publick Intelligencer, Mercurius Politicus’s partner newsbook, and likewise edited by Marchamont Nedham 1657 Launch of Nedham’s and Newcombe’s Publick Adviser, a weekly consisting entirely of advertisements (e.g. medical/tuition services, property rental) 1659 An increase in print polemic following the fall of the Protectorate and the return in May of the Rump Parliament

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1660–1699 1660 In Ireland publication of short-­lived An Account of the Chief Occur­ rences of Ireland Mercurius Caledonius (31 December 1660–8 January 1661), edited by Thomas Sydserf or St Serfe, first known newspaper to be produced in Scotland and conducted in full by a Scotsman (May) Return and restoration of Charles II Henry Muddiman given news monopoly and his previously titled Parliamentary Intelligencer is renamed The Kingdome’s Intelligencer Oliver Williams’s A Perfect Diurnall Of every dayes Proceedings in Parliament comes out on an almost daily basis for almost a month but cannot be considered the first daily newspaper since its content was based on official orders, bills, proclamations and government appointments 1661 Parliament prohibits publication of its proceedings 1662 The Licensing Act requires all print to receive prior authorisation 1663 Roger L’Estrange appointed Surveyor of the Press and given news monopoly, leaving Muddiman to concentrate on the production of a lucrative manuscript newsletter Launch of L’Estrange’s Intelligencer in which counterintuitively he claims ‘a Public Mercury should never have my vote, because I think it makes the multitude too familiar with the actions and counsels of their superiors’ In Ireland Mercurius Hibernicus is launched by Samuel Dancer and lasts for at least fifteen issues; the publication includes weekly reports from the Court of Claims

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timeline 609 1665 Launch of the Oxford Gazette (renamed the London Gazette in 1666), the newspaper of record which was to dominate the news landscape up until the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695 Three years after the founding of the Royal Society, Henry Oldenburg launches Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, a general scientific and medical journal including anatomical studies on animals, accounts of natural phenomena, descriptions of geographical locations and the publication of experimental scientific essays encapsulating the new matter-­of-­fact thought style of observation 1666 Launch of Gazette de Londres, the third London-­ based French-­ language news publication, following Le Mercure Anglois (1644–8) and Nouvelles ordinaires de Londres (1650–60) 1671 Various issues of the London Gazette include requests for information about the king’s and queen’s lost dogs in its ‘Advertisements’ section, testifying to the beginning of local news in the rubric, which Addison positively referred to later as ‘news from the little world’ 1674 Launch of The Old Bailey Proceedings, a specialised periodical giving information about criminal trials at the Old Bailey, London’s central criminal court 1678 Death of Marchamont Nedham, one of the best and most colourful newsmen of the seventeenth century, who wrote alternately for the parliamentarians (1642–46), Oliver Cromwell and Parliament (1650–60), the royalists (1647–49) and Charles II (1676–78)

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1679 The Exclusion Crisis (1679–81) leads to a collapse in press controls and a proliferation of partisan print polemic Parliament fails to renew the Printing Act Benjamin Harris’s Whig Domestick Intelligence begins publication in July 1680 The Whig newspaper The True Protestant Mercury is launched Introduction of the penny post 1681 Launch of Heraclitus Ridens, a Tory (and most likely government-­ sponsored) comment serial which offered ‘A ­Discourse . . . ­where many a True Word is spoken in opposition to all Libellers against the Government’ Launch of Roger L’Estrange’s Tory Observator, a comment serial which for the next few years led Tory publications in their opposition to the Whigs The Votes of the House of Commons published (as again in 1689) 1683 First guide to the printing trade, Mechanick Exercises; or The Doctrine of Handyworks applied to the Art of Printing, published by Joseph Moxon 1685 The News-Letter, published in Dublin, reproduces the contents of Irish-­bound English manuscript newsletters 1686 Benjamin Harris’s fierce anti-­Catholic polemic lands him in difficulty with the government and he flees to America, where in Boston in 1690 he publishes Publick Occurrences, the first American newspaper

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timeline 611 1690 Dublin Intelligence (1690–93), the first long-­running Irish newspaper 1691 Athenian Gazette (from no. 2 Mercury): ‘resolving weekly all the most Nice and Curious Questions proposed by the Ingenious’ 1692 Launch of Gentleman’s Journal, containing a monthly blend of news, prose and poetry 1693 Launch of John Dunton’s short-­lived Ladies Mercury, the first specialist women’s publication, which through a question-­and-­answer format claimed to address ‘all the most nice and curious questions concerning love, marriage, behaviour, dress, and humour of the female sex, whether virgins, wives, or widows’ First recorded use of ‘journalist’ in the OED, though the word had more the sense of political or governmental news reporting 1694 Publication of The Ladies Dictionary, which under entries such as ‘beauty’ and ‘beauty in general’ promotes a traditionalist image of women 1695 (May) Parliament allows Licensing Act to lapse, which formally ends compulsory pre-­publication licensing of print Following the lapse of the 1695 Act, the launch of three long-­lasting newspapers: the Flying Post, Post Boy and Post Man 1696 Launch of Lloyd’s News, forerunner of Lloyd’s List (established in 1734), and specialising in shipping news John Dunton launches Pegasus (1696), but having originally followed

612

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the traditional format of news and comment, transforms the publication into a serial of comment since ‘The Publick being so well supplied with News already by other ­Papers . . . ­there seems to be very little need of placing the Text before the Commentary’ Launch of Dawks’s News-Letter, an evening newsletter making use of script type aimed at conveying the personal tone of a handwritten newsletter to the newspaper 1699 Edinburgh Gazette, published by James Watson, generally considered Scotland’s first recognisably modern newspaper with both foreign, national and local news

1700–1749 1701 Norwich Post, England’s first provincial newspaper, is published, followed either the same year or the following year by the Bristol Post-Boy 1702 Launch of the Daily Courant, the first long-­running daily newspaper, the editor stating he would not ‘give any Comments or Conjectures of his own, but will relate only Matter of Fact; supposing other People to have Sense enough to make Reflections for themselves’ Launch of John Tutchin’s and George Ridpath’s Whig Observator, a comment serial which announces that its ‘Business is to make Observations, and to draw Conclusions from occurring Circumstances’, and designed to attack Tories, High Churchmen, Jacobites and papists, all considered intent on overthrowing the ‘ancient constitution’ which underpinned Englishmen’s rights and liberties 1704 Launch of Daniel Defoe’s Weekly Review of the Affairs of France, sponsored by Robert Harley, politician and prime minister in everything but name

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timeline 613 1705 Launch of Edinburgh Courant, Scotland’s first successful biweekly Launch of Dublin Gazette, official government newspaper Defoe’s ‘Scandal Club’ rubric is so successful that alongside the Review he now publishes the Little Review; in one number of the Review he informs a reader who had complained about his journal’s excessive advertising that ‘the Principal Support of all the Publick Papers now on Foot, depends upon the Advertisements; a­ nd . . . m ­ ost of them could not bear their own Charge without them’ 1707 Act of Union of England and Scotland as Great Britain ratified 1709 The launch of Richard Steele’s Tatler, an essay periodical that established a new kind of journalism, and to which Joseph Addison contributed On the back of the Tatler’s success, launch of the Female Tatler, whose fictitious persona Mrs Phoebe Crackenthorpe displayed both learning and a delight in ‘tattle’ 1710 Tory Examiner founded, briefly edited by Swift 1711 Launch of Addison and Steele’s Spectator Scottish version of the Tatler written by Robert Hepburn, who replaced Steele’s eidolon, Isaac Bickerstaff, with his own Scots persona, Donald MacStaff Launch of the Newcastle Courant, one of the most successful provincial newspapers 1712 Stamp Act (which does not apply to Ireland) enacts duties on paper and advertisements; full sheets taxed at one penny per sheet, or a halfpenny for half sheet, while an advertisement tax of 1 shilling was imposed on every ad carried

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1713 Launch of Steele and Addison’s Guardian 1714 Defoe becomes editor of the Whig Flying Post and Medley 1715 Launch of the Glasgow Courant, principally serving the west of Scotland Launch of the Cork Idler, the first Irish regional newspaper The first Jacobite Rising 1716 Launch of the Weekly Journal (becoming Mist’s Weekly Journal in 1725) – over the years Nathaniel Mist, its staunch Jacobite editor, frequently lands in trouble with the law and on occasion escapes to the Continent 1717 Launch of the Kentish Post or Canterbury Newsletter, taking on its current name, Kentish Gazette, in 1768 1718 Edinburgh Evening Courant, Scotland’s first evening newspaper, is launched; its publisher, James McEuen, declaring that the paper was ‘very well-­liked by all except the violent Jacobites’ Launch of Leeds Mercury (later merged into Yorkshire Post) First official press on Welsh soil established at Trefhedyn, Cardiganshire Launch of Elizabeth Powell’s Orphan Reviv’d; or, Powell’s Weekly (1718–20), the first newspaper of any length to include a woman’s name in the title 1719 Launch of the Daily Post, with Defoe as contributor

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timeline 615 1720 Launch of the Caledonian Mercury, which unlike the Edinburgh Evening Courant emphasises its Scottishness Stocks in the South Sea Company suddenly fall in price with investors losing large sums of money A series of hard-­hitting, anti-­government letters by John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon are published in the London Journal and British Journal under the pseudonymous title ‘Cato’s letters’ 1722 Robert Walpole buys the London Journal, creating a more government-­ friendly publication 1724 Swift’s Drapier’s Letters (1724–25), attacking the English government for a scheme to supply Ireland with copper halfpence and farthings, published in George Faulkner’s Dublin Weekly Journal in 1725 1725 New Stamp Act aims to close extant loopholes in the 1712 Stamp Act by applying taxation measures to all papers of whatever length and size Stereotyping, which in the nineteenth century would become a standard printing office practice, invented by Edinburgh goldsmith William Ged Launch of George Faulkner’s Dublin Journal, a highly successful publication attracting much advertising 1727 Launch of the Ladies Journal, promoting literary instruction on the basis of essays and illustrative stories and poems so that ladies ‘could obtain the Preference over Men by their Application to Learning’ Probably the first established printer in Wales sets up in Carmarthen, the most important printing centre in the country until the end of the century

616

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1728 Nathaniel Mist flees Britain to avoid prosecution 1730 Launch of the Grub-Street Journal – describing its editorial policy as ‘new’, the newspaper compiled news collected ‘from all the Papers of the preceding week’ 1731 Launch of Edward Cave’s generalist Gentleman’s Magazine, providing a miscellany of news including medical reports and having Samuel Johnson among its writers Launch of the Daily Advertiser, at first carrying only advertisements Launch of Medical Essays and Observations, the first issue of a medical periodical which together with other short-­lived medical journals published by ‘Societies of Edinburgh’ came to be referred to as the Edinburgh Medical Journal 1733 A system of licensing of hawkers is introduced in Ireland and by 1746 the yearly licence costs £1 1735 Short-­lived attempt by Lewis Morris to launch a Welsh-­language periodical, Tlysau yr Hen Oesoedd (Gems of Past Ages) 1737 Launch of tri-­weekly Belfast News-Letter, considered by some to be the oldest continually published English-­language newspaper 1739 Launch of the Scots Magazine, recognised as Scotland’s first magazine on the grounds that it was produced and conducted in full by Scots with an emphasis on Scottish matters, attacks English periodicals, ‘calculated for the good of Great Britain [with] Scotland . . . little more than nominally considered’

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timeline 617 1741 Launch of the York Gazetteer, which declaring it was founded to ‘correct the weekly poison of the York Courant’, exemplifies the sometimes bitter competition of the provincial press 1742 First type foundry in Scotland established in St Andrews 1743 Stamp Act attacks unstamped news outputs directly by restricting and banning use of street vendors as point of sale 1744 Launch of Eliza Haywood’s monthly Female Spectator, which like other women’s periodicals of its time uses the journal’s eidolon to encourage the practice of reading among women 1745 The second Jacobite Rising 1747 Launch of Henry Fielding’s pro-­government Jacobite’s Journal 1748 James Chalmers’s Aberdeen Journal, first substantial newspaper in north of Scotland 1749 Launch of Ralph Griffiths’s eighty-­page Monthly Review, a periodical whose authoritative reviews could make or break a newly published book Launch of the Ladies Magazine: or, the Universal Entertainer, a successful fortnightly periodical containing history, extracts from books and serialised fiction

618

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1750–1800 1750 Launch of the Rambler, with majority of essays written by Samuel Johnson 1755 Johnson publishes A Dictionary of the English Language, a landmark in English lexicography 1756 Launch of the Critical Review, or Annals of Literature, edited and partly owned by Tobias Smollett, and the Monthly Review’s chief competitor; the influence of the two periodicals was resented by many including Samuel Johnson, who wrote ‘Criticism is a study by which men grow important and formidable at very small expence’ (The Idler, 1759) 1757 Increase in taxes on newspapers (further increased in 1776, 1789 and 1797) 1758 Launch of the Universal Chronicle, or Weekly Gazette (including Johnson’s Idler) 1759 Launch of the Lady’s Magazine; or, Polite Companion for the Fair Sex, one of several mid-­century women’s magazines to employ the language of fair-­sexing in their titles 1762 Launch of John Wilkes’s North Briton, in opposition to Tobias Smollett’s Briton

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timeline 619 1763 Wilkes arrested for seditious libel following publication of number 45 of North Briton; in the issue he had criticised King George III and his ministry for making too generous a peace with France Launch of the Freeman’s Journal, which changed from opposition to pro-­government to the most important Irish nationalist daily newspaper in Dublin in the nineteenth century 1764 Franking Act allows newspaper proprietors to send (under certain conditions) newspapers free of charge to a Member of Parliament, who in turn could forward the materials again without charge 1765 Stamp Act is introduced into the American colonies by the British Parliament 1766 Launch of the Limerick Chronicle 1769 Launch of Anne Fisher’s Ladies Own Memorandum-Book, which included financial and business information that had usually been considered the preserve of a male readership 1770 Launch of the Lady’s Magazine; or, Entertaining Companion for the Fair Sex, targeting women from the ‘house-­wife’ to the ‘peeress’, all of whom, the editor hoped, would ‘meet with something suitable to their different walk in life’ Fifteen fortnightly issues of Welsh-­ language Trysorfa Gwybodaeth published, including eight pages of home and foreign news together with Welsh history, essays and poetry

620

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1771 Press gains right to report parliamentary business Birmingham Chronicle starts using type designed by John Baskerville in late 1750s; in 1931 a version of his type was designed for the English Linotype company Launch of Dublin’s Hibernian Magazine, a general interest and literary magazine ‘Containing, the greatest variety of the most curious and useful subjects in every branch of polite literature’ 1773 The Stock Exchange is founded 1774 The Stamp Act introduced in Ireland increases costs for newspapers not interested in accepting offers of financial assistance from the government Hansard first reports parliamentary debates 1779 First Sunday newspaper, E. Johnson’s British Gazette and Sunday Monitor Launch in Edinburgh of William Creech’s literary magazine, the Mirror, followed in 1785 by the Lounger 1783 Launch of the first long-­running Glasgow newspaper, the Glasgow Advertiser, which continues to this day as the Herald The Dublin Volunteer’s Journal, supporting the nationalist Volunteers Movement, is thought to have incited a mob to invade the Irish Parliament, and Carey, the newspaper’s editor, is apprehended 1784 First custom-­built Royal Mail coaches

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timeline 621 1785 Daily Universal Register, renamed the Times in 1788, receives annual government subsidy from 1789 to 1799 1787 Launch of the radical newspaper the Sheffield Register 1788 Launch of the Star, first daily evening paper The direct London–Glasgow (via Carlisle) mail coach route established 1789 Launch of the Oracle, or Bell’s New World 1790 Patent granted to William Nicholson for a letterpress printing machine which speeded up production but was never built 1791 The Observer, the oldest surviving Sunday newspaper, is founded Thomas Paine publishes first volume of Rights of Man 1792 Launch of Edinburgh Gazetteer, a short-­lived but influential radical newspaper Fox’s Libel Act is passed: the law of seditious libel remains, but its ability to check and suppress popular causes is diminished 1793 Launch of two radical periodicals: Thomas Spence Pig’s Meat or Lessons for the Swinish Multitude and Daniel Isaac Eaton’s Politics for the People; Or, a Salmagundy for Swine

622

timeline

1795 Short-­ lived Welsh periodical, The Miscellaneous Repository, neu y drysorfa gymmysgedig, published by Thomas Evans, the first Unitarian minister in Wales, includes radical and political material (The first English-­language newspaper based in Wales, The Cambrian, is published in 1804) 1797 The United Irishmen’s Northern Star closes down after the military enter its Belfast print shop without a warrant and destroy all the equipment 1798 The Newspaper Act restricts the management of newspapers, imposing penalties for exporting papers to enemy territories and copying from foreign sources items considered malicious or libellous against the king and constitutional government Launch of the Anti-Jacobin Review, a conservative political periodical Launch of the Lady’s Monthly Museum, a periodical which, apart from containing similar fare to the Lady’s Magazine (e.g. moral stories, poetry and letters to the editor), also encouraged and obtained greater interaction between authors and readers

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Archives and Libraries with Holdings of Manuscripts and Printed Materials Aberdeen University: Special Collections Bangor University Archives Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana Biblioteca Comunale Teresiana di Mantova Biblioteca Nazionale di Napoli British Library Chester Record Office Cork Archives Institute Denbighshire Record Office (now North East Wales Archives) Edinburgh University: New College Flintshire Record Office (now North East Wales Archives) Huntington Library, San Marino, CA Marsh’s Library, Dublin Mostyn Hall, private collection The National Archives, Kew (TNA) National Archives of Scotland (NAS) National Library of Ireland, Dublin (NLI) National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh (NLS) National Library of Wales (NLW) National Museums Scotland (NMS) The Postal Museum and Archive, London/Kew Public Record Office of Northern Ireland (PRONI) Royal Irish Academy, Dublin (RIA) Trinity College Dublin (TCD) William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, UCLA Yale University

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INDEX

Page numbers in italics denote illustrations Aberdeen Intelligencer, 38, 274, 295–6 Aberdeen Journal, 38, 274, 293, 295–6, 296, 305, 308, 310, 318 Abhorrence, or, Protestant observations in Dublin, 557 Account of a most horrid and barbarous murther of Captain Brown, 501 Account of a most Inhumane And Barbarous MURDER by William Sherloge, 501 Account of the Chief Occurrences of Ireland, 78, 239, 537 Account of the Proceedings of the Meeting of the Estates in Scotland, 532 Adams, John, 384 Adams, William, Jr, 272, 292 Adburgham, Alison, 137 Addison, Joseph, 15, 21, 22, 34, 35, 139, 163, 210, 212–13, 227, 228, 514–15, 577 advertising anti-competitive practices, 294–5 book advertisements, 15–16, 32–3, 35, 177 early terminology, 14, 201 examples, 16, 35 importance of, 14–15, 19, 34–8, 45, 49–50, 164–5, 221, 303–7 invitations for, 257 in Ireland, 45, 249, 251–4 job advertisements, 58, 219 language of, 211–13 Lost and Founds, 13–15, 201, 254 in magazines, 301–3, 303, 304 medical advertisements, 15–16, 211–13, 253, 424–5 parodies, 201, 212–13 rates, 251 runaway announcements, 15, 564–74 in Scotland, 289, 291, 301–7, 303, 304, 305, 306 taxation of, 40, 82, 249, 251 theatre playbills, 581–2 topics covered, 15–16 typography and layout, 252

Advice from the Scandal Club, 19 Affaires de l’Angleterre et de l’Amérique, 401 Alarm Bell, 581 Albion, 44 Alkin, Elizabeth, 134, 550 Allan, David, 117 Allan, John, 293 Allen, Ralph, 232 almanacs, 355–6, 356–7, 362 America availability of Scottish news, 326, 333–4 Scottish news as source material, 313–36 American War of Independence, 378–9, 401, 483–8 American Weekly Mercury, 315, 316 Amhurst, Nicholas, 142 Amsterdam Courant, 387 Analytical Review, 526 Anderson, Adam, 336 Anderson, Dr James, 279, 299, 333–4, 334 Anderson, Mrs, 289 Anderton, William, 91 animadversions, 458 Annals of Medicine, 287 Annual Register, 525 anonymous contributors, 141–2 anti-competitive practices, 294–5, 307–8 Anti-Jacobin, or Weekly Examiner, 456, 467 Anti-Jacobin Review, 468, 526 antisemitism, 317 Applebee, John, 227, 228 Applebee’s Original Weekly Journal, 462 apprentice printers, 70, 72–3 Archer, Thomas, 131, 173 Aris’s Birmingham Gazette, 57 Arlington, Lord, 179 Armitage, David, 380 Armstrong, Nancy, 409, 413 Arnall, William, 223 Arne, Thomas Augustine, 339–40 Arnot, Hugo, 270

678

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index 679 Asquith, Ivon, 47 Aston, Sir Willoughby, 160 Athenaeum Literary Lounge, Aberdeen, 312 Athenian Gazette, 35 Athenian Mercury, 19–20, 20, 135, 136, 410 Atherton, Ian, 150, 156 Aubrey, John, 11–12 Auditor, 466 Audley, Thomas, 11, 558 Auld, William, 295 Ayre’s Sunday London Gazette, 47 Bailey, Francis, 330 Bailey, Nathan, 409 Bain (or Baine), John, 61–2 Baker, Geoff, 554 Baker, Helen, 8–9 Baldwin, Richard, 16 Baldwin’s London Journal, 465 Balfour, John, 278, 287, 294 Ball, Henry, 160 ballads, 130, 202, 337–43, 357–8, 362, 458, 459, 589–90, 595 Ballard, Mr (postmaster of Usk), 355 Banton, M. P., 564 Baratariana, 255 Barber, Alex W., 155–6, 163, 533 Barker, Hannah, 7, 25, 39, 113, 114, 149, 165, 220 Barnard, Toby, 106 Baron, Sabrina A., 155, 530, 533, 534 Barr, Rebecca, 106, 110 Baskerville, John, 61, 63, 64 Batchelor, Jennie, 136, 407, 414, 415 Bate, Henry, 229, 233 Bath Chronicle and Weekly Gazette, 58, 75, 76 Bauer, Walter, 60 Beals, Melodee, 592, 598 Beckford, Richard, 466 Bee; or Universal Literary Intelligencer, 279, 299, 333–4 Belfast News-Letter, and General Advertiser, 38, 39, 249, 250 Bell, Andrew, 299 Bell, Emily, 592, 598 Bell, John, 47 Bell’s Weekly Messenger, 47 Benedict, Barbara, 211–12 Bensley, Thomas, 60 Berkenhead, (Sir) John, 10–11, 30, 199, 558 Betancourt, Michel, 593 Bewick, Thomas, 59 Bibliotheca Universalis, 288 Bickham, Troy, 379 Bingley, Edward, 236 Birmingham Chronicle, 57, 61 Birmingham Register, 466 Black, Jeremy, 238 Blackstone, Sir William, 94 Blackwell, William, 64 Blackwell’s (ink manufacturers), 64–5 Blackwood’s Magazine, 269 Bladen, William, 78–9, 556–7 Blair, Hugh, 141, 294 Blanchard, William, 421

Blount, Thomas, 410 Bloy, C. H., 63 Blundell, William, 554 Bly, Antonio T., 572–3 Bodley, Thomas, 575 Boerio, Davide, 369 Bohun, Edmund, 91 Boie, Heinrich Christian, 382 Boig, Adam, 272, 288, 289–91 Bolter, David Jay, 152–3 Bonner and Middleton’s Bristol Journal, 27 book advertisements, 15–16, 32–3, 35, 177 Border, Daniel, 476–7 Borsay, Peter, 117 Bös, Birte, 6–7 Bossy, Dr, 430 Bostock, Robert, 133 Boston Evening Post, 314–15, 316, 317, 318, 321, 322 Boston Gazette, 317, 323, 324 Boston News-Letter, 156, 313–14, 318 Boston Post-Boy, 317, 318 Boston Weekly News Letter, 315 Boston Weekly Post-Boy, 315 Boswell, James, 294, 582 Boulton, Sir Harold, 337 Bourne, Nicholas, 29, 131, 173 Bowen, Lloyd, 345, 350–1, 550 Boyer, Abel, 388 Boyle, Robert, 429 Boys, Jayne, 553 Braddell, William, 264 Braddick, Michael J., 346–7 Bradford, Cornelia Smith, 315 Braudel, Fernand, 373 Bray, Thomas, 109 Brewer, John, 104, 113, 114, 116 Brief Relation, 177 Bristol Gazette, 61 Bristol Post-Boy, 93 Bristol’s Country Advertiser, 483 British Gazette and Sunday Monitor, 47 British Journal, 463 British Library Nineteenth Century Newspapers, 588–9, 595 British Magazine (1746–50), 298, 464 British Magazine (1760–67), 466 British Medical Journal, 438 British Mercury, 451 British Observator, 39 British Physician, 431 Briton, 466, 467 broadsides, 283–4, 337–8 broadside ballads, 202, 337–43, 589–90, 595 Brooke, Henry, 248, 265 Brown, James, 537 Brown, William, 272 Brownlees, Nicholas, 154, 536 Brymer, Andrew, 276, 297 Bryson, Robert, 269–70, 271 Buckley, Samuel, 226 Burke, Edmund, 25, 380, 525 Burke, Peter, 384, 394, 403 Burney, Frances (Evelina), 511, 524

680

index

Burney Newspaper Collection, 588–9, 590, 593–4, 600–1 Burns, Robert, 278, 307, 340 Burrows, Simon, 151 Butler, James, 1st Duke of Ormond, 188, 189 Butter, Nathaniel, 29, 131, 173, 196 Cabinet, 468 Caledonian Gazetteer, 301 Caledonian Mercury, 38, 57, 204–6, 222, 272, 273–4, 285, 288, 290, 292–3, 294–5, 301, 303, 305, 307, 310–11, 389, 391, 480, 485, 486, 488, 504–5 as source material, 316, 324–6, 328–32, 334, 335–6 Callender, James Thomson, 279 Cambrian, 5, 361 Cambrian Bibliography, 346 Cambridge University Press, 57, 64, 92 Campbell, Duncan, 156 Campbell, John, 156, 314 Campbell, Robert, 326 Campbell, Samuel, 326 Capp, Bernard, 550 Cardonnel, Adam, 161–2 Care, Henry, 90 Carey, Matthew, 248–9 Carlile, Alexander, 293 Carolus, Johann, 156, 366 Carter, John, 323 cartoons, 182 Cary, Walter, 162 Caslon, William, 60, 62, 64 Cave, Edward, 137, 210–11, 432, 515 Cavendish, Charles, William, Duke of Newcastle, 530 Censor (England), 93 Censor (Ireland), 81–2, 93, 247 Censor Extraordinary, 581 censorship see control and censorship Certain Passages of every Daies Intelligence, 477 ‘chain-copying’, 533 Chalaby, Jean, 147 Chalmers, George, 336 Chalmers, James, 38, 274, 293, 295, 310 Chambers, Robert, 272–3 Champion, 230, 463 Chapman, Laurence, 133 Character of a London-Diurnall, 12, 12 Charitable Mercury and Female Intelligence, 42 charity schools, 108–9 Charles I, King, 29–30, 174, 371, 372, 373, 513, 576 Charles II, King, 88, 513, 530, 537, 599 Charles, Thomas, 356, 360 Charleston Evening Gazette, 327 Charleston Morning Post, 328 Charnell-White, Cathryn, 346, 358 Chelmsford Chronicle, 75 Chester Chronicle, 57, 357, 361 Chester Courant, 360–1 Chester Weekly Journal, 360 Chidley, Katherine, 134, 550 Cholmondeley, Thomas, 350

Chouillet, Anne-Marie, 397, 400, 401 Christian Diurnal, 287–8 church news, 286, 293 Churchill, John, Duke of Marlborough, 578–9 circulation figures, 30, 41, 93, 164, 250 Citizen, 463, 466 Claridge, Claudia, 506, 507 Clark, Charles E., 150–1 Clark, Sandra, 495 Claydon, Tony, 538 Clear discovery of the malicious falsehoods in a Paper Intituled A TRUE RELATION . . ., 508–9 Cobbett, William, 34, 334 Cochran, James, 276, 297 Codogno, Ottavio, 373 coffee houses, 9–10, 34–6, 101, 104, 115–16, 123–4, 234–5, 289, 311–12, 375, 577–8 coffee room, Lord Street, Liverpool, 123 Colclough, Stephen, 417 Cole, Francis, 188 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 44, 468 Collectanea Hibernica Medica, 438 collective organisations, 70–1, 73 Colles, Isaac, 265 Colley, Linda, 379 Colonia, 372 Colston, John, 282 Columbian Centinel, 332 Columbian Herald, 327, 328 Comenius, Jan Amos, 177 comment, 451–71 in early modern context, 454–7 in serial press, 457–68 Commentator, 228 Common Sense, 463, 485, 485 Compleate Intelligencer and Resolver, 458 compositors, 57–8 Con-Test, 466 Conboy, Martin, 47 Conjurer, 276 Connecticut Gazette, 320 consortia partnerships, 45–6 Constable, Archibald, 278 Constantine, Mary-Ann, 358 Constitutional Magazine and True Briton’s Friend, 468 Continental Journal, and Weekly Advertiser, 325 Continuation of our Weekly Newes (1631), 389 Continuation of our Weekly News (1625), 173 Continuation of the diurnall passages in Ireland, 188 Continuation of the True Diurnall Occurrences in Parliament, 270, 555 Continuation of the true Diurnall of Last weeks passage, 174 control and censorship during Civil War, 83–5 effectiveness of, 530 during Interregnum, 33, 85–8, 177 in Ireland, 32, 79–83, 244, 248–50 under Licensing Act 1662, 31, 88–91, 113, 477–80, 549 parliamentary reporting, 43, 97–9, 155–6

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index 681

Daily Universal Register (later Times), 50–1, 62, 64, 143, 456 Dancer, Samuel, 255–62 datelines, falsification of, 187 Davies, Captain Thomas, 350 Davies, J. H., 348 Davieses of Gwysaney, 350 Dawks, Ichabod, 153 Dawson, Colonel James, 246–7 de Chauliac, Guy, 436 de Fonvive, Jean, 167–8 de Ritter, Richard, 112 de Sallo, Denis, 514 De Vivo, Filippo, 532 Declaration of the Army of England, 474–5 definitions, 6–8, 409–10, 453–4, 546, 575–6 Defoe, Daniel, 19, 21, 33, 34, 49, 95, 122, 144–7, 145, 226, 227, 228–32, 234, 236, 237, 291, 388, 390–1, 461, 514, 577, 578 Delafaye, Charles (London Gazette), 162 Delafoye, Charles (distribution agent), 41 Democritus Ridens, 460 Dennis, John, 580 Deploration of the cruell murther of James Earl of Moray, 500 Derby Mercury, 481–2 Dering, Sir Edward, 257 Dermott, James, 261 Deveraux, Simon, 502 dialogue, 459–60, 469–70 Diario noticioso (Madrid), 375 Diary, 334 Diary or Woodfall’s Register, 33 digitised resources, 586–601 computer-assisted approaches, 591–4 digitised collections, 588–91 Irish news case study, 191–4 materialist accounts, 594–6 towards contextual digitisation, 17, 596–9 Dillingham, John, 132, 178, 186, 369 Dilucidator, 456 Dingwall, Helen, 112 diplomacy, 160–3, 535–7 Director, 228 Disney, William, 90 distribution systems, 40–1, 74–6, 140, 165, 183–4, 243–4, 250, 308–12, 362 to America, 326, 333–4 Diurnal Occurrances (Edinburgh reprint), 31, 269–70, 287–8 Diurnall Occurrances, 308, 555–6 Diurnall of Some Passages and Affairs (Leith reprint), 270 Diutinus Britanicus, 458 Dockwra, William, 234 Docwra, Ann, 134 Dodd, Anne, 237 Domestick Intelligence, 89, 500, 536 Donaldson, Alexander, 295, 296, 302 Donaldson family, 295 Donaldson, James, 271, 272, 274, 288–90, 302 Donaldson, William, 336 Doneraile, Lord, 252 Dooley, Brendan, 187, 531

post 1695, 91–100, 235 role of Church, 549 in Scotland, 32, 270, 275, 279, 288, 292 seditious libel, 89, 99–100 see also copyright; government sponsorship; stamp duty Conway, Paul, 597 Coolahan, Marie-Louise, 591 Cooper, Thomas Abthorpe, 217 copyright, 96, 515 corantos, 6, 10–11, 29–30, 171–4, 172, 186, 187, 196–7, 391, 457 Cordell, Ryan, 595–6 Cork Evening Post, 39 Cork Idler, 39 Cotgrave, Randle, 104 Cotterell, Thomas, 61 County Magazine, 466 Couper, W. J., 269, 270, 271 Courier, 465 Courier and Evening Gazette, 217 Court, City and Country Magazine, 466 Court of High Commission, 84, 85 Covent-Garden Journal, 581 Cox, Walter, 250 Coyle, Karen, 587 Crabbe, George, 584 Crackenthorpe, Mrs Phoebe, 20, 136 Cradock, Walter, 354 Craftsman, 142, 464 Cranfield, Geoffrey Alan, 57 Creech, William, 298 Crehan, J. H., 562 Cressy, David, 103 crime and trial reporting, 493–510 17th century pamphlets, 494–7, 496 in early newsbooks, 497–9, 498 golden age of, 501–7 in Irish press, 500–1, 505–6 in London Gazette, 499–500 murder of Archbishop of St Andrews, 507–10 in Scottish press, 500–1, 504–5, 507–8 Crisis, 466 Critical Review, 511–12, 517–28 Cromwell, Oliver, 33, 190, 191, 372, 559, 576 Crooke, John, 79 Crosby, Brass, 99 Crouch, John, 13, 133, 201 Crowley, Tony, 219 Cumberland Pacquet and Ware’s Whitehaven Advertiser, 57 Cunningham, John, 420, 421–2 Curelly, Laurant, 551 Curll, Edmund, 235, 236 Curtis, Laura A., 147 Cylch-grawn Cynmraeg, 346, 359 Dahl, Folk, 187 Daily Advertiser, 182, 211 Daily Courant, 1, 17, 93, 140, 184, 203, 209, 226, 387, 391 Daily Gazetteer, 43, 208–9, 463 Daily Journal, 16, 182, 463 Daily Post, 228

682

index

Dossena, Marina, 338 Douglas, Francis, 274, 298 Douglas, George, 249 Downie, J. A., 221 Drennan, William, 255 drink and drunkenness, 11–13, 70–1 Drumfries Mercury [sic], 278, 293 Dublin Daily Advertiser, 38 Dublin Daily Post, and General Advertiser, 38 Dublin Evening Journal, 244–5 Dublin Evening Post, 32–3, 49, 250, 252 Dublin Gazette, 17, 18, 79, 240–1, 557 Dublin Intelligence, 32, 79, 180–2, 203, 240–1, 537 Dublin Journal (Faulkner’s Dublin Journal), 45, 46, 139–40, 204, 221, 242, 246–7, 252, 254, 255, 376–7, 390, 482–3 Dublin Library Society, 241–2 Dublin Magazine, 466 Dublin Mercury, 82, 465 Dublin Post, 166 Dublin Spectator, 579 Dublin Spectator, 578 Dublin Weekly Journal, 579, 581 Duff, James, 2nd Earl of Fife, 310 Duick, John, 342 Dumfries Mercury, 141 Dumfries Weekly Journal, 296 Dumfries Weekly Magazine, 278 Duncan, Andrew, 435, 435 Duncan, Dr John, 287 Dunciad (Pope), 236 Dundas, Henry, 1st Viscount Melville, 279, 300 Dundee Weekly Intelligencer, 274, 296 Dunlap’s American Daily Advertiser, 332, 335 Dunton, John, 19–20, 21, 92, 135, 388, 410, 412, 452 Durston, Thomas, 357 Dury, Giles, 179 Dyche, Thomas, 217 Dyer, John, 156, 157, 158, 164 Eaton, Daniel Isaac, 25–6, 213, 300, 300 ecclesiastical news, 286, 293 Echo, or Edinburgh Weekly Journal, 276 Edinburgh Advertiser, 274, 295, 303, 305, 311 as source material, 323–4, 325, 326–7, 330 Edinburgh Advisor, 325 Edinburgh Chronicle, 294 Edinburgh Courant, 17, 93, 141, 222, 272, 289, 290–1, 290 Edinburgh Eighth Day Magazine, 296 Edinburgh Evening Courant, 37, 38, 45–6, 47, 272–3, 277, 288, 292, 294–5, 301, 305–7, 306, 311, 315, 486 as source material, 314, 317, 318–21, 322, 323, 324, 326, 327–8, 332 Edinburgh Flying Post, 17, 272 Edinburgh Gazette, 17, 141, 203, 222, 268, 271–2, 272, 288–90, 291, 295, 303, 309, 364 Edinburgh Gazetteer, 268, 274–5, 295 Edinburgh Herald, 295 Edinburgh Magazine, 277, 466 Edinburgh Magazine and Review, 298

Edinburgh Magazine, or Literary Miscellany, 331 Edinburgh Medical Journal, 434–6, 435, 441, 442, 443–6, 449 Edinburgh Museum, or North-British Magazine, 299, 300 Edinburgh Review (1755–56), 269, 278, 294, 298 Edinburgh Review (1802–1929), 278, 298 Edinburgh Weekly Journal, 295 editor, role of, 130–1, 143 Edwards, Elizabeth, 346 Egerton, John, 1st Earl of Bridgewater, 350 Eikon Basilike (Charles I), 513 elections, 246–7 Elliot, Charles, 33, 298 Ellis, Markman, 115, 116 emigration, 249, 336–43 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 299 English Chronicle, 309 English Civil War, 10–11, 30–1, 84–7, 131–4, 174–7, 198–9, 224, 257, 351–4, 365, 371–3, 373, 457–8, 474–6, 549–51, 552–3, 558–60, 576 English Currant, 479 English Freeholder, 467 Englishman, 461 engravings, 299 Entertainer, 461–2 Epstein, Jean, 398 Erskine, David Steuart, 11th Earl of Buchan, 333 Erskine, Thomas, 100 Essays and Observations, 286–7, 434 État actuel et politique de l’Angleterre, 401 État politique actuel de l’Angleterre, 401 Eton Journal, 481 EuroNews project, 385–6 European Enlightenment, 324, 376–8; see also Scottish Enlightenment European influence, 186–7 Evans, Jonathan, 346 Evans, Thomas, 358 Evelyn, John, 63 Evening Advertiser, 465 Evening Mail, 465 evening papers, 47–9 Evening Post, 17, 47 Examiner, 17, 95, 139, 210, 226, 230, 232–3, 234, 461, 578 Examiner (Edinburgh reprint), 276 Exchange coffee room, Liverpool, 123–4 Exhortation to the Inhabitants of the South Parish of Glasgow, 293 Express, 385 Extraordinaries, 534 Fabre, Madeleine, 397, 400, 401 ‘fair-sexing’, 21, 135 Faithful Scout (1651–55), 201, 458, 476–7, 498–9 Faithfull Intelligencer from the Parliaments Army in Scotland, 31, 270, 271 Faithfull Scout (1659–60), 458 Farley’s Bristol Newspaper, 76 Faulkner, George, 45, 46, 139–40, 221, 245, 252 Faulkner’s Dublin Journal see Dublin Journal

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index 683 Feather, John, 54 Federal Gazette, 330–1 Federal Orrery, 331 Felix Farley’s Bristol Journal, 27, 40–1 Female Spectator, 21, 137, 413 Female Tatler, 17, 20–1, 136–7, 413 Ferguson, Adam, 141, 328 Ferguson, Margaret, 104, 105, 111 Fergusson, Robert, 278, 301 Feyel, Gilles, 401 Fielding, Henry, 223, 226, 230, 576, 580, 581, 582 Figgins, Vincent, 61 Fisher, Anne, 416–17, 418–22 FitzGerald, Lord Edward, 266 Fitzmaurice, Susan, 216 Fitzpatrick, W. J., 266 Fleetwood, Charles, 354 Fleetwood, Lord General, 88 Fleming family, 292 Fleming, Robert, 46, 296 Fletcher, John, 57 Flint, George, 236 Flood, Henry, 264, 265, 267 Flying Post, 32, 92, 140, 149, 165, 166, 182, 203, 209–10, 223, 309, 389, 469, 539–44 Flying Post and Medley, 146, 462 Fog’s Weekly Journal, 142 Forbes, John, 309 Forbes, Robert, 338 foreign correspondents, 371–3, 382–3, 384–5; see also manuscript newsletters Foulis, Andrew, 59 Foulis brothers, 63 Fourdrinier brothers, 70 Fox, Adam, 104 Fox, Charles James, 100 Franckton, John, 78 Franklin, Benjamin, 70–1, 248, 315, 331, 333 Fraser, James, 91 Fraser, Peter, 156 Free Briton, 461, 464 Freebaird, Robert, 283 Freeholder’s Magazine, 467 Freeman’s Journal, 82, 83, 140, 248, 249, 262–7, 330 Freke, John, 93–4 French Revolution, 381–3; see also Jacobinism; radical press Fry, Edmund, 61 Fry, Henry, 61 Fry, Joseph, 61 Fyfe, Paul, 191, 595 Gaceta de Madrid, 367, 368 Gaelic publishing, 280 Gaine, Hugh, 326 Gainsford, Thomas, 11, 29, 130–1 Garden, Alexander, 310 Gardenstone, Lord, 286 Gardner, Victoria, 45, 421 Garland, Sam, 345 Gaylard, Doctor, 236 Gazette d’Amsterdam, 151, 394–6, 402

Gazette de France (La Gazette, Paris Gazette), 366–7, 366, 369, 370, 372, 387, 392–4, 393, 397, 398–400, 399, 402, 535, 542 Gazette de Leyde, 394 Gazette de Londres, 403–5, 404, 536 Gazette (London) see London Gazette Gazette (Strasbourg), 156 Gazetteer and New Daily Advertiser, 217 Gazettes et papiers anglais, 401 Gazzetta di Mantova, 373 Ged, William, 59 Geismar, Haidy, 587 General Advertiser, 35, 465, 581 General Evening Post, 244, 484 general warrants, 97–8 Generall nevves from all parts of Christendome, 186 Genet, Edme Jacques, 400–1 Genius of Kent, 468 Gent, Thomas, 58 Gentleman’s Magazine, 26–7, 134–5, 137, 142, 210–11, 276, 297, 432, 440, 441, 445–6, 449, 464, 515–17, 516, 525 Gill, John, 325 Gillespie, Raymond, 106, 110 Giraffi, Alessandro, 369 Glasgow Advertiser (later Herald), 46, 274, 296, 330, 332, 334–5 Glasgow Courant (1715, later West Country Intelligence), 38, 141, 280–1, 283, 293 Glasgow Courant (1745), 295–6, 483 Glasgow Courant (1791), 305, 312 Glasgow Herald (original), 294, 295–6 Glasgow Journal, 293, 317, 324, 325 Glasgow Magazine and Review, 278 Glasgow Mercury, 296, 303, 305, 328, 329–30 Glasgow-Weekly-History, 293 Globe, 127 Godolphin, Sidney, 226 Goff, Moira, 594 Goldsmith, Oliver, 577, 584 Gordon, Thomas, 463 Gouge, Thomas, 108–9 Govan, Donald, 293 government control see control and censorship; stamp duty government sponsorship, 33–4, 51, 81, 82, 95–6, 141–2, 249–50, 265–6, 292, 530–1 Grand Politique Post, 497–8, 498 Grant, John, 264 Grattan, Henry, 264, 265, 267 Grayson, Edward, 127 Great Britain’s Rule of Health, 431 Green and Russell’s Boston Post-Boy & Advertiser, 319 Greene, Lorenzo, 571 Greenspan, Nicole, 550 Griffith, Arthur, 266 Griffiths Jones, Reverend, 356 Griffiths, Ralph, 517, 518, 522, 584 Gross, Alan G., 4 Grub Street, 13, 96, 575 Grub-Street Journal, 13, 23–5, 185, 209 Grundy, Isobel, 407

684

index

Grusin, Richard, 152–3 Gucer, Kathryn, 551 Guild of St Luke, 79–80 Gurney, John, 141 Gutenberg, Johannes, 63 Guthrie, William, 142 Habermas, Jürgen see public sphere Haffemayer, Stéphane, 397, 399–400 Halhead, William, 57 Hall, John, 475 Hamburgische unparteyische Correspondent, 378–9 Hamilton, Archibald, 519 Hamilton, Gavin, 278, 287, 294 Hamilton, Hugh Douglas, 243 Hammond, Iohn, 270 Hampshire Chronicle, 486 handbills, 252 Hansard, 60–1, 64–5 Hansard, Luke, 72, 76 Hanson, Laurence, 221 Harlem Courant, 387 Harley, Robert, 33, 95–6, 139, 140, 145, 146, 226, 229, 230, 231, 234 Harris, Benjamin, 89, 92 Harris, Bob, 274–5 Harris, Michael, 40, 164–5, 226–7, 532 Hartley, L. P., 2 Harvey, Philip Whitfield, 267 Haywood, Eliza, 137 Heads of Severall Proceedings in both Houses of Parliament, 174 Heads of Severall Proceedings in the Present Parliament (Edinburgh reprint), 270 Heads of Severall Proceedings in this Present Parliament, 3, 10, 30, 133–4, 174, 555–6 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 364 Hepburn, Robert, 139, 291–2 Heraclitus Ridens, 460, 471 Herd, David, 343 Herd, Harold, 130 Hereford Journal, 361 Heylyn, Peter, 549–50, 558 Hibernian Chronicle, 211, 212 Hibernian Journal, 484, 486, 505–6 Hibernian Magazine, 140 Hickes, James, 180 Higgins, Christopher, 270–1 Higgins, Francis, 249, 265–7 Hill, Bridget, 409 Hill, Christopher, 92 Hill, John, 581 Hills, Henry, 90 Hippocrates ridens, 430 Historical Register, 300, 300 History of the Works of the Learned, 514 Hodgson, Sarah, 416, 422 Hodgson, Solomon, 422 Hogarth, William, 433 Holt, Sir John, 99 Hope, John, 320–2, 322 Hornby, Charles, 236

Houston, Keith, 520 Houston, Robert Allan, 104, 105, 106, 107, 108, 111, 112 Howard, Gorges Edmond, 248 Hughes, Lorna, 597 Hughes, William J., 345 Huhtamo, Erkki, 594 Hume, David, 94, 99, 141, 526–7 Hume, Robert D., 591 hybridity of print media, 532–5 Hyp Doctor, 464 Idler, 582–4 illustrations, 59–60, 174–5, 178, 182, 299 Impartial Scout, 134 Independent Gazetteer, 329 Independent Journal, 330 Independent Ledger, 325, 326 indexes, 295 ink, 63–5 Intelligence Domestick and Foreign, 92 Intelligencer, 179–80, 388, 580, 586 Ipswich Journal, 212, 502, 503–4 Irish Mercury, 134, 475 Irish Monthly Mercury, 31, 134, 188, 202, 257, 475, 537 Irish news, form and layout, 188–94, 190 Irish press, 239–67 advertising, 45, 249, 251–4 control and censorship, 32, 78–83, 244, 248–50 crime and trial reporting, 500–1, 505–6 development of, 17, 31–2, 39, 78–83, 202, 203, 221–2, 239–42, 537, 556–7 distribution systems, 243–4, 250, 310 government sponsorship, 249–50 impact on politics, 245–7 medical journals, 438 print runs, 250 printing, 242–3, 260–1 and stamp duty, 249, 251, 263–4 typography and layout, 252 irony see satire, parody and irony Irvine, Alexander, 557–8 Isaac, Peter, 420, 422 Israel, Jonathan, 380 Jackson, Joseph, 61 Jackson, Owen David, 383 Jackson, Robert, 278 Jacobinism, 82–3 Jacobite Rebellion (1745), 480–3 Jacobite’s Journal, 223, 226 Jacobitism editorial stances on, 272–3, 276–7, 291, 292–3, 297–8 Jacobite ballads, 336–7, 338, 340–2 press reporting of, 81, 280–4, 315–16 and religion, 107–8 tracts in support of, 95 see also Mist, Nathaniel James, Elinor, 134 James II, King, 90, 538–45, 563

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index 685 Jebb, Frederick, 248, 255 Jeffrey, Francis, 278 Jenkins, Bethan, 346 Jenkins, Geraint H., 108, 109, 112, 345 Jenkins, James, 254–5 job advertisements, 58, 219 Johnson, E., 47 Johnson, Henry, 62 Johnson, Samuel, 9–10, 142, 409, 465, 525, 526, 582–4 Johnston, William, 274 Jones, Aled Gruffydd, 39 Jones, Dafydd, 357 Jones, Edward, 534–5 Jones, Hugh, 358 Jones, John, 354 Jones, Mair Ffion, 346 Jones, Samuel, 108 Jones, Thomas, 345, 348, 355, 360, 362 Jonson, Ben, 12, 21, 575, 585 Journal de Guienne, 397 Journal des sçavans, 429, 514 ‘journalist’, as term, 143, 409–10 journeymen printers, 70, 72 Joy, Francis, 38 Keating, Erin, 156 Kelly, James, 495 Kelso Chronicle, 296 Kemble, Sarah (Mrs Siddons), 217 Kenrick, William, 217–18 Kentish Gazette, 486 Kentish Post, 502, 503 Keymer, Thomas, 221 Kilday, Anne-Marie, 495, 500 King, Peter, 504, 506 Kingdomes Intelligencer, 6, 7 Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer, 174, 175, 189, 191, 458 Kingdomes Weekly Post, 178, 451 Kingdom’s Intelligencer – to Prevent False News, 287–8 King’s Patent, 74–5 King’s Printer, 56, 71, 74 King’s Printer in Ireland, 78–80, 260–1, 557 Kingston, Duchess of, 233 Knights, Mark, 532, 538 Koenig, Frederich, 60 Kümin, Beat, 114, 115 Ladies’ Diary: or, the Woman’s Almanack, 20, 135 Ladies Dictionary, 410–12, 412 Ladies Journal, 21 Ladies Mercury, 19–20, 20, 135, 410–12 Ladies Own Memorandum-Book, 416–17 Lady’s Magazine (1759–63), 21 Lady’s Magazine (1770–1832), 21, 137, 407, 407, 413–15 Lady’s Monthly Museum, 415–16 Lady’s Museum, 137 Lake, Peter, 495, 496 Lancaster Gazette, 218–19

Lancet, 438 language, 195–219 of advertising, 211–13 in corantos, 196–7 in newsbooks, 198–202 in newspapers, 203–11 pronunciation, 215–19 law publications, 285–6 Lefanu, W. R., 424, 429, 431, 434 Lemmings, David, 502, 503 Lennox, Charlotte, 137 Leslie, Charles, 225, 461 L’Estrange, (Sir) Roger, 1, 31, 88, 90, 95, 179–80, 369, 388, 455, 460, 469, 552 letters from anonymous contributors, 141–2, 165 to the editor/press, 36, 165, 465 libel, 47, 80–1, 100, 236–7, 245; see also seditious libel ‘liberty of the press’, 93–4 licensing see under control and censorship Lichfield, Leonard, 599 Lightbody, Hannah (later Greg), 126 Lilburne, John, 87, 134 Limerick Chronicle, 243, 244 Limerick Journal, 39, 247 Lisbon earthquake, 376–8, 377 literacy patterns, 105–13 in England, 106–7 gaps in scholarship, 106 impact of media coverage, 379 impact of religion, 112 in Ireland, 109–10, 241 in Scotland, 107–8, 308 understandings of term, 103–5 in Wales, 108–9, 355, 356 women’s literacy, 111–12 Literary Magazine, 525 literary reviews, 511–28 Gentleman’s Magazine and London Magazine, 515–17, 516 during Interregnum, 513–14 Monthly Review and Critical Review, 511–12, 517–28 Tatler and Spectator, 514–15 Little, K. L., 564 Little Review, 19 Liverpool Athenaeum, 119, 124, 126–7 Liverpool Chronicle, 123 Liverpool Courant, 123 Liverpool General Advertiser, 123 Liverpool Library, 115, 125–6, 125, 511 Liverpool, readerships in, 115, 119, 122–8 Lloyd, Edward, 81 Lloyd’s Evening Post, 486 Llwyd, Richard, 357 Locke, John, 93 Lockhart, Sir William, 392–4, 393 Löffler, Marion, 346, 361 Logographic Press, 50, 62 London Advertiser and Literary Gazette, 463 London Chronicle, 219, 381, 488, 506 London Courant, 101, 342, 479, 481

686

index

London Evening Post, 34, 207–8, 465, 480, 484, 486–7 London Gazette, 6–7, 13–15, 16, 18, 22, 31, 88, 89, 90, 138, 148–9, 150–3, 155, 157–8, 160–1, 163, 164, 174, 179, 180, 181, 195, 202, 204–6, 224, 283, 318, 355, 367, 368, 369, 376–7, 392, 477, 478, 479, 483, 485–6, 488, 499–500, 531, 534–5, 536, 552, 553, 565–6, 599–601; see also Gazette de Londres London Journal, 141, 463 London Magazine, 297, 464, 515–17, 525 London Medical Journal, 431 London Mercury, 479 London Morning Chronicle, 380–1, 380 London Morning Penny Post, 504 London Recorder, 47 London Stationers’ Company see Stationers’ Company London World, 381 Londonderry Journal, 249 Lord, Peter, 345 Lost and Founds, 13–15, 201, 254 Lounger, 36, 36, 298 Lucas, Charles, 81–2, 247, 255, 264 Lucas, John, 264, 265, 267 Luffingham, Benjamin, 253 Lunardi, Vicenzo, 328 Lynx, 467 Macartney, George, 1st Earl Macartney, 327 Macdonald, Flora, 316, 340–1 McDowell, Paula, 135 McElligott, Jason, 530, 558 McEnery, Tony, 8–9 McEuen, James, 272, 276, 292, 293 Macinnes, Allan, 107 Mackenzie, Henry, 340 McLaughlin, Mairi, 385, 398, 401–3 Maclaurin, Colin, 317 McLean, Ralph, 278 Macleod, Allan, 44 McShane, Angela, 595, 597 Magan, Francis, 266 magazines, 268–9, 275–9, 296–301, 466–7 Magee, James, 32–3, 249 Magee, Thomas, 249 Mak, Bonnie, 594–5 Maley, Willy, 345 Mallet, Elizabeth, 140 Malone, James, 557 Man in the Moon, 133 Manchester Guardian, 2 Manchester Mercury, 219 Manley, Delarivier, 20, 136, 233 Mansfield, Lord Chief Justice, 100 Manufacturer, 228 manuscript newsletters, 149–69, 365–6 content of commercial newsletters, 155–60, 158, 159, 164–5, 168–9 diplomatic correspondence, 160–3 foreign correspondents in London, 371–2 formats and layouts, 150–5, 152, 154, 164 hybridity of, 533–4 manuscript additions to print, 166–9, 167

Marsh, Richard, 362 Marshall, Ashley, 147, 158, 591 Martin, Gilbert, 299 Martin, Robert, 65 Martin, Thomas, 65 Maruca, Lisa, 406 Massachusetts Gazette, 320 Master Mercury, 456 Mathie, Benjamin, 46 Matthews, John, 95 Maxwell, Lieutenant Colonel, 127 Maynwaring, Arthur, 232–3, 461 Mazarin, Cardinal, 366–7, 372 medical advertisements, 15–16, 211–13, 253, 424–5 Medical and Philosophical Commentaries, 287, 434, 436–7, 438 Medical and Physical Essays, 438 Medical Communications, 431 Medical Essays and Observations, 286, 434 medical press, 423–50 early periodicals, 425–31 midwifery treatises, 439–50 non-specialised content, 431–2 specialised periodicals, 286–7, 431, 432–9 Medical Transactions, 431 Medicina curiosa, 429 Medley, 232–3, 461 Mee, Jon, 279 Mémoires pour l’histoires des sciences et des beaux arts, 514 Mennons, John, 46, 274, 278, 296 Mennons, Thomas, 47 Merchant’s Coffee-House, Liverpool, 124 Mercure Anglois, 404 Mercure Historique et Politique, 462 Mercurius Aulicus, 10–11, 30, 132, 176, 198–9, 200, 457, 458–9, 531, 558–60 Mercurius Bellicus, 459 Mercurius Britanicus, 11, 30, 132, 176–7, 198–9, 458, 558 Mercurius Britanicus (Scotland), 270–1 Mercurius Caledonius, 141, 269, 271, 537 Mercurius Civicus, 11, 178, 202 Mercurius Democritus, 13 Mercurius Elencticus, 458, 459, 475–6, 558–60 Mercurius Fidelicus, 13 Mercurius Fumigosus, 133, 201 Mercurius Hibernicus; or the Irish Intelligencer, 79, 197, 240, 255–62 Mercurius Hybernicus, 188 Mercurius Melancholicus, 458, 459 Mercurius Politicus, 31, 87, 133, 177, 185, 199–201, 270, 389, 390, 391–4, 393, 456, 458, 473, 474, 475, 489–92, 531, 557–8, 576 Mercurius Pragmaticus, 30–1, 132–3, 458, 459, 475–6 Mercurius Publicus, 151, 270 Mercurius Reformatus, 453, 460 Mercurius Rusticus, 558–9 Mercurius Scoticus, 31, 202, 270, 271, 475 Mercury (Cork), 257 Mervyn, Audley, 261

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index 687 Middlesex Journal, 142, 465 Middleton, John, 269 Midgley, Rob, 430–1 midwifery treatises, 439–50 Millstone, Noah, 534 Milton, Anthony, 549, 549–50 Milton, John, 94, 513, 576 Mirror, 36, 298 Miscellaneous Repository, neu y drysorfa gymmysgedig, 358 Mist, Nathaniel, 16, 141–2, 146, 210, 227, 228, 235–8, 388, 462–3 Mitchell, Mark E., 600 Moderate, 178, 190, 458 Moderate Intelligencer, 185, 186–7, 189, 190, 369–71, 370, 458, 498–9 Moderator, 471 Modern History, 561–3 Modest Narrative of Intelligence, 185 Molesworth, Robert, 91 Molineux, 565 Moncur, John, 282–3, 283 Monitor, 466 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley, 137 Montague, Elizabeth, 421 Montague, Lord, 132 Montgomery, James, 44 Monthly Chronicle, 420 Monthly Magazine, 466 Monthly Mercury, 554 Monthly Review, 511–12, 517–28, 584 Moore, Isaac, 61 Moranville, Monsieur (translator), 405 Morison, James, 299–300 Morning Chronicle, 143, 382, 385, 465 Morning Herald, 34, 217, 485 Morning Post, 143, 208, 229, 233, 381, 485, 488, 582 Morphew, J., 431 Morris, Lewis, 39, 359 Morrissey, Mary, 549 Morys, Huw, 353, 357 Mosman, John, 272 Moss, William, 119, 123–4, 125, 126 Mostyn, John, 351 Mostyn, Thomas, 347, 354 Motte, Benjamin, 580 Moxham, Noah, 8, 165, 402 Moxon, Joseph, 54, 60, 63–4, 70, 71 Muddiman, Henry, 151, 153, 179, 180, 534 Mudie and Son, publishers, 287 Mullin, Gerald W., 572–3 Mundell and Son, printers, 286 Munter, Robert, 39, 223–4, 257, 537 Murray, Andrew, 276, 297 Murray, James, 2nd Duke of Atholl, 273 Murray, John, 287, 298 Murray, William, 274 Murther, Murther, or A bloody Relation, 495–6, 496 Musgrave, Sir Richard, 251 Musson, A. E., 71–2 Myddelton, Sir Thomas, 353 Mytton, Sir Thomas, 353

Napoli, 372–3 Narrative of the Horrid Murther [of the Archbishop of St Andrews], 510 Nedham (or Needham), Marchamont, 11–12, 22, 30–1, 86, 87, 88, 132–3, 177, 179, 198, 199–202, 224, 474, 475, 477, 489–92, 531, 558, 576 Neill, Patrick, 294 Nelson, Caroline, 532 Nevitt, Marcus, 134, 177, 550 New Scots Spy, 307 New State of Europe, 462 New-York Gazette, 318, 320–1, 323, 324, 326, 334 New-York Gazetteer, 364 New-York Journal, 318, 324, 326 New-York Mercury, 318, 319, 320 Newcastle Chronicle, 420, 421, 422 Newcastle Courant, 41, 58, 75, 421, 480, 481 Newcastle General Magazine, 464 Newcastle Journal, 222, 465 Newcastle Magazine; or, Monthly Journal, 75 Newcastle Weekly Mercury, 464 Newcombe, Thomas, 87, 599 Newenham, Sir Edward, 255 Newes and affaires of Europe, 186 Newes from Europe: with the particular Accidents, 174 Newes (L’Estrange), 179, 369, 388 news aggregation, 23–5 ‘news’, definition of, 7–8 News-Letter (Dawks), 153 News-Letter (Dublin), 79, 81, 180–2, 240, 261 news writers, 533 perceived character flaws, 11–13 newsbooks comment in, 457–9 crime reporting in, 497–9, 498 form and layout, 174–8 growth of, 9–13, 30–2 language of, 198–202 legal control, 17–18, 31–2 medical items in, 424–5 reviews in, 513–14 in Scotland, 31–2, 202, 269–71 in Strasbourg, 156, 366 terminology, 6–8 in Wales, 351–4 and war, 474–7 newsboys, 243–4 newsletters see manuscript newsletters newsmen, 76 Newspaper Act of 1798, 49 newspapers content and language, 155–60, 203–13 formats and layouts, 148–55, 184–5, 252, 459–68 terminology, 6–8 newsrooms, 118–19 Nicholson, William, 60 Nicol, John Watson, 342 Night-Walker (Dunton), 135 Nonsense of Commonsense, 137 Norfolk Chronicle, 58, 76, 487 North British Intelligencer, 467

688

index

North Briton, 97, 466 North Wales Gazette, 361 Northampton Mercury, 75, 206, 486 Northern Star, 83, 244, 250, 251, 584 Norwich Post, 93 Nouvelles ordinaires de divers endroicts, 398–9, 399 Nouvelles ordinaires de Londres, 186, 404, 405, 535–6 Nutt, Elizabeth, 237 Ó Ciosáin, Niall, 110 ‘observations’, 454–6 Observator (Edinburgh), 464 Observator (L’Estrange), 90, 180, 455, 460, 552, 554 Observator (Tutchin/Ridpath), 99, 225, 455, 461, 468–71 Observer, 4, 47 Ohlmeyer, Jane, 501 Old Bailey Proceedings, 501–3, 505–6 Old England, 223, 463, 464 Old Maid, 413 Oldenburgh, Henry, 428 Oliver, Richard, 99 O’Neill, Owen Roe, 189 Oracle, 34 Oracle or Sunday Gazette, 47, 48 Oram, Hugh, 261 Orange Gazette, 287–8, 478, 479 Ordinary’s Account of executed offenders, 501 Ormonde, Duke of, 233 Orphan, 42, 456 Orphan Reviv’d; or, Powell’s Weekly, 42 Osborne’s New-Hampshire Spy, 331 Oxford Gazette (later London Gazette), 174, 180, 197, 599 Paine, Thomas, 25, 213, 300, 359, 485, 485 papermaking, 65–70, 67, 68, 69, 70 Papiers anglais, 401 paragraphs of news, 185–6 Parikka, Jussi, 594 Paris Gazette (Gazette de France) see Gazette de France Paris Gazette (Watson), 290 Parker, George, 227 Parliament Scout, 458 Parliamentary Intelligencer, 151 parliamentary privileges, 310 parliamentary reporting, 43, 97–9, 142, 155–6, 245–7, 246, 554–6 Parliamentary Scout, 132 parody see satire, parody and irony Parsons, Nicola, 410 Patriot, or Political, Moral and Philosophical Repository, 468 Peacey, Jason, 133, 405, 496, 530, 531, 535–6, 550, 555 Pearson, Jacqueline, 112 Pearson, T. A., 57 Pecke, Samuel, 131, 132, 133–4, 174, 175 Pegasus, 452, 453, 462 Pennant, David, 353

Pennant, Thomas, 348 Pennsylvania Evening Post, 324 Pennsylvania Gazette, 315, 316 Pennsylvania Packet, or The General Advertiser, 325, 328, 329 Penny London Post, 207 Perfect Account of the Daily Intelligence, 498 Perfect Diurnall of some Passages and Proceedings, 476 Perfect Diurnall of some Passages in Parliament, 475 Perfect Diurnall of some Passages of Parliament [sic], 475 Perfect Diurnall of the Passages in Parliament, 10, 30, 131, 175, 175, 178, 185, 189 Perfect occurrences of every dayes journall in Parliament, 178, 179, 189 Perfect Passages, 458 Perfect Proceedings of State-Affairs, 477 Perfect Summary, 178, 458 Perfect Weekly Account, 86 Perrot, Charles, 152 Perry, James, 143, 382, 385 Perth Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure, 278, 299–300 Peters, Lisa, 346 Pettegree, Andrew, 156, 164, 165, 220, 225, 228, 229, 546 Philadelphia Gazette, 332 Philanthropist, 467 Philips, Katherine, 256–7 Phillips, John, 562 Philosophical Transactions, 425–9, 427, 438, 441, 442–3, 444–8 Pig’s Meat or Lessons for the Swinish Multitude, 25–6 pillory, 237 Pincus, Steve, 538, 543 Pine, William, 61 Pitt, William, the Elder, 466 Pitt, William, the Younger, 26, 33, 49 Pittock, Murray G. H., 336 Poetical Observator, 471 Poetical Observator Reviv’d, 455 poetry and verse, 183, 202, 204, 254–5, 278, 291, 293, 299, 300, 301, 328, 331, 353, 357, 358–9, 584; see also broadside ballads Pole, Anne, 169 Political Controversy, 467 Political Herald and Review, 467 Political Magazine, 468 Political Register, 467 Politics for the People; Or, a Salmagundy for Swine, 25–6 Pollard, Mary, 261 Poole, John, 330 Pope, Alexander, 235, 236, 577–8, 580 Poplar, Daniel, 91 Porcupine, 34 Porcupine’s Gazette, 334 Porteous, Captain John, 314–15 Post Boy, 16, 18, 92, 149, 165, 166–9, 167, 202–3, 223, 233, 375, 388, 540, 541, 545, 566

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index 689 Post Man, 18, 149, 165, 166, 167–8, 169, 203, 208, 223, 233, 540–4 Post-Man (Dublin), 211 postal system, 140, 165, 183–4, 309–10, 311–12, 373–4; see also distribution systems postscripts, 184 Powell, Elizabeth, 42 Powell, Humphrey, 78 Powell, Manushag N., 136, 407 Powell, Vavasor, 354 prefaces, 458 Prescott, Andrew, 593, 594, 597 Present State of Europe, 462 Present State of the Republick of Letters, 514 Press (Dublin), 250, 255 pressmen, 57–8 print runs, 250, 474 print shops apprentice printers, 70, 72–3 Defoe on, 231–2 growth of, 74–5 in Ireland, 74–5, 242–3, 260–1 journeymen printers, 70, 72 in and near Wales, 356, 357, 362 organisation of trade, 70–3 pay rates, 73 printing presses, 54–60, 55 in Scotland, 74, 270–2 production costs, 45 promotional activities, 299–300 pronunciation, influence of press, 215–19 Protestant Mercury, 541–4 Protestor, 466 Providence Gazette, 318, 320, 323, 326 provincial press, 5, 38–41, 75–6, 203, 222, 464, 502–4 provincialism, 217–19 Prynne, William, 84 Prys, Sir John, 355 Prys, Stafford, 357 Public Advertiser, 100, 142, 180, 465, 483, 484, 486, 487 Public Advertiser; or, The Theatrical Chronicle, 253 Public Register or Freeman’s Journal see Freeman’s Journal public sphere (Habermas), 92, 138, 148, 234–5, 375–6, 409, 529–32 Publick Adviser, 177, 199, 425 Publick Intelligencer (Nedham), 31, 87, 177, 199, 369, 391, 477 Publick Occurrences Truly Stated, 90 Pue’s Occurrences, 242 puffs, 582 questions and answers, 458 Quintessence des lettres historiques, 384 radical press, 4, 25–7, 44, 81–2, 213, 255, 268, 274, 359, 361, 526 Rambler, 465, 583 Ramsay, Allan, 340, 342 Ramsay, David, 46, 292 Randall, David, 166

Randall, Susannah, 546 Raven, James, 117, 118 Ray, Joseph, 79, 240–1 Ray, Martha, 233 Raymond, Joad, 8, 165, 177, 199–200, 402, 542, 546, 550, 558 Rayner, William, 227 Read, James, 227 Readinesse of the Scots to Advance into England, 133 Reading Mercury, 76 Read’s Weekly Journal, 462 Rebels Turkish Tyranny, 497, 497 Reconciler, 455 Reed, Daniel, 549 Rees, Josiah, 39, 359 ‘reflections’, 456 regionial press see provincial press Rehearsal, 225, 471 Reid, Andrew, 514 Reid, Jessica, 269 Reid, John, Sr and Jr, 271, 283, 288, 289, 291 Reid, Margaret, 283 Relation of the late horrible treason, 389 Relation of the Late Occurrents Which have happened in Christendome, 173 religion and news, 546–60 Catholic-leaning periodicals, 561–3 during English Civil War, 558–60 in foreign news, 553–4 historiography, 547–51 influence on crime reporting, 493–7 in Irish press, 556–7 in parliamentary reporting, 554–6 in Scottish press, 557–8 source material, 551–2 Remembrancer, 463 Renaudot, Théophraste, 366, 535 Reutke, Chelsea, 548, 558 Reveur, 276 Review of the Affairs of France (Review, Defoe), 17, 19, 34, 95, 145, 146, 147, 210, 226, 228–32, 234, 461, 471, 514, 578 Rhydderch, John, 356, 357 Rhys, Morgan John, 359 Richardson, Samuel, 577, 581 Ridpath, George, 455, 468–71, 539–40, 540 Rivington, James, 325 Robert, Louis, 70 Roberts, Robert, 357–8 Robertson, John, 285, 289–90, 293, 296, 301 Robertson, William, 278, 527–8 Robinson, Henry Crabbe, 385, 584 Rolland, William, 292 Roper, Abel, 168 Royal Gazette, 325 Royal Magazine, 466–7 Ruddiman family, 285, 295, 296, 301–3 Ruddiman, Thomas, 272, 273–4, 277, 285, 293, 336 Ruddiman, Walter, Jr, 277–8, 295, 298, 302 Ruddiman, Walter, Sr, 293, 310 runaway announcements, 15, 564–74

690

index

Rusbridger, Alan, 1 Russel, Richard, 24–5 Sacherevell, Henry, 145 Saggi di Nauturali Experienze fatte nell’Accademia del Cimento, 425 St Serfe (or Sydserf ), Thomas, 269, 271 Saint, Thomas, 421 Salesbury, Sir William, 353 Salisbury Journal, 5, 464 Salisbury, Sally, 234 Salopian Journal, 44 Salusbury, Sir Thomas, 351 Salvetti, Amerigo, 371 Sands, William, 276, 297 Sarpi, Paolo, 367–8 satire, parody and irony, 11, 21–2, 30, 133, 136–7, 139, 185, 201–3, 212–13, 236–7, 291, 325–6, 430–1, 459, 578, 580 Saunders’s News-Letter, 25, 251, 254, 486 Scarborough King, Rachael, 533 Schobesberger, Nikolaus, 374–5 Schwyzer, Philip, 345 Scientia Naturali et Medicina gestis, 435–6 scientific press, 287 Scotch Counsellor, 133 Scotch Mercury, 536 Scotish Dove, 133, 202, 458 Scots Chronicle, 295 Scots Courant, 281–3, 291 Scots Magazine, 140, 269, 275–8, 286, 296–9, 302–3, 317, 318, 326, 389, 464 Scots Postman, or the New Edinburgh Gazette, 290 Scots Privy Council, 32 Scots Spy, 307 Scott, Alexander, 275 Scott, C. P., 2 Scottish Chronicle, 307 Scottish Diaspora, depictions of, 336–43 Scottish Enlightenment, 141, 320–2, 432–4, 526–8; see also European Enlightenment Scottish press, 268–343 advertising, 289, 291, 301–7, 303, 304, 305, 306 broadside ballads, 337–43 control and censorship, 32, 270, 275, 279, 288, 292 crime and trial reporting, 500–1, 504–5, 507–8 distribution systems, 308–12 early newsbooks, 31–2, 202, 269–71 growth of newspapers, 38, 222, 271–5, 279, 287–96, 557–8 law, theology and medical publications, 285–7 magazines, 268–9, 275–9, 296–301, 318, 326 medical periodicals, 432–4 news diplomacy, 536–7 news writers and ‘chain-copying’, 533 radical press, 268, 274 as source material for American press, 313–36 as source of wealth, 45–7 Scourge, 466 Seccombe, Matthew, 532 Sedgwick, Robert, 491–2

seditious libel, 89, 99–100, 245, 248 sequential numbering, 173, 174 Seren Gomer, 361 Severall Proceedings in Parliament, 475 Shakespeare, William, 575 Sharp, James, Archbishop of St Andrews, 507–10 Sharpe, James A., 491–2 Sheffield Iris, 44 Sheffield Register, 44, 58 Shelton, Thomas, 132 Sherborne Gazette, 5 Sheridan, Richard Brinsley, 582 Sheridan, Thomas, 215–16, 580 Shevelow, Kathryn, 413 Shift Shifted, 236 Shipley, William Davies, 100 shipping news, 32, 157, 272, 274, 305 Shoemaker, Robert B., 503 shorthand, 132, 141 Shrewsbury Chronicle, 361 Sibbald, James, 295, 298–9 Siebert, Fredrick, 95, 97 Simonton, Deborah, 111 Simpson, John, 1, 2 Slack, Thomas, 417, 419, 420, 421 Slauter, Will, 7, 153, 185 slavery and slave trade, 4, 26–7, 317, 332, 564–74 Smellie, William, 287, 295, 298, 299, 307 Smith, Adam, 278, 527, 528 Smith, Adam James, 587 Smith, Elizabeth, 237 Smith, Francis, 97 Smith, George, 133 Smith, Mrs Adam, 217 Smollett, Tobias, 519, 522, 524, 581 Smout, Christopher, 112 Snell, Esther, 502, 503 Snell, Hannah, 357 social libraries see subscription libraries Society for the Promotion of Christian Knowledge (SPCK), 108–9, 356 Socini, Pietro, 372 South-Carolina Weekly Gazette, 328 Sowle, Tace, 134 Spalding, John, 308 Sparling, William, 127 Spectator, 17, 19, 22–3, 35–6, 138, 210, 212–13, 226, 238, 461, 514–15, 577–8 Spence, Thomas, 25–6 Spie, 458 Spirit of the Times, 456 sponsorship see government sponsorship Spurlock, R. Scott, 550 Squarciafico, Gaspare, 369 St James’s Evening Chronicle, 33–4 St James’s Evening Post, 47 Staffordshire Advertiser, 44 Stairs, Lord, 161 Stalker, Andrew, 293 Stamford Mercury, 5, 486 stamp duty, 39–40, 41, 42–3, 82, 95, 96, 182–3, 203, 249, 251, 263–4, 277, 296, 302, 305, 323 Stanhope, Earl, 59

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index 691 Star, 49, 311, 312 Star Chamber, 84, 85, 171, 173 start-up costs, 44–5 State Gazette of South-Carolina, 328–9, 335 Stationers’ Company, 75, 78, 84, 85, 89, 90, 134, 224, 530, 536–7, 558 Staves, Susan, 409 Steele, Richard, 21, 35, 135, 138–9, 148, 161–2, 210, 227, 228, 229, 233, 461, 514–15, 577 Steele, Thomas, 51 Stemphill, Robert, 500 Stephens, Robert, 91 Stephens, William Brewer, 106, 127 stereotyping, 59 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 336–7 Stewart, Dugald, 295 Stobart, John, 123 Stower, Caleb, 65 Stoyle, Mark, 345 Stuart, Daniel, 143 Stuart, Gilbert, 298 Stuart, John, Earl of Bute, 466 Suarez, Michael, 17 subscription libraries, 116–18, 124–7 Successi del mondo (Turin), 372 Sunday Monitor, 47 Sunday newspapers, 47 Sunday Press, 4 Sunderland, Earl of, 146 Sutherland, James, 89, 148–9, 152 Suzuki, Mihoko, 104, 105, 111 Sweet, Rosemary, 117 Swift, Jonathan, 21, 95, 96, 135, 139, 147, 210, 221, 225, 226, 228, 232–3, 233, 255, 461, 577, 578–80 Swinney, Miles, 57, 61 Symmer, Alexander, 311 Symson, Andrew, 272 Tandy, Edward, 264 Tatler, 17, 19, 35–6, 135, 138–9, 148, 210, 461, 514–15, 577, 578 Tatler (Edinburgh), 276, 291–2 taverns and inns, 114–15 taxation see stamp duty Tayler, William, 42 terminology, 6–8, 409–10, 453–4, 546, 575–6 Test, 466 Test Paper and Public Occurrences Truely Stated, 287–8 The tryal of Philip Standsfield, 501 theatre reviews, 294, 581–2 Thirty Years War, 29, 186–7, 365, 553–4, 556 Thomas, John, 3 Thomas, John, of Penffordd-wen, 359 Thornton, Robert, 240–1 Thurloe, John, 177, 200, 490, 490 Tickler, 581 Tilloch, Alexander, 59 Tilson, George, 161–2 Times, 5, 26, 33, 45, 50–2, 62, 64, 381, 382, 385, 584 Timothy, Ann, 329, 335 Timothy, Benjamin Franklin, 335

Timothy, Peter, 329 Tindal, Matthew, 94 Tlusty, B. Ann, 114, 115 Tlysau yr Hen Oesoedd, 359, 360 Toland, John, 48–9 Tomahawk!, 467 Tontine Coffee Room, Glasgow, 311–12 Town and Country Magazine, 466 Towsey, Mark, 107, 118 Tracy, Francis, 266–7 Transactions of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, 287 translation, 384–405 acknowledgement or ‘credit’, 386–7 anonymity of translators, 389 English into French, 394–403 fidelity of, 196–7, 385–6, 402–3 original and translation compared, 369–71, 370, 392–4, 393 translation strategies, 187, 391–4, 536 use of Latin, 389–90 Trenchard, John, 463 Trevor-Roper, Hugh, 108 trial reporting see crime and trial reporting tripartite model, 462–4 Tripper, John, 135 True Account of the Horrid Murther [of the Archbishop of Saint Andrews], 509–10 True Briton, 461 True Copy of the Papers Delivered by Mr Rob. Chernocke and others, 541 True Informer, 458 True Narrative of The late most Horrid and Barbarous Murder [of the Archbishop of St Andrews], 510 True Protestant Mercury, 89–90 True Relation concerning the MURTHER of the ArchbP of St Andrews, 508–10 True Relation of the Affaires of Europe, 171–2, 172 Trysorfa Gwybodaeth, neu Eurgrawn Cymraeg, 39, 359 Trysorfa Ysprydol, 349, 360 Tutchin, John, 99, 225, 455, 461, 468–71 Twyn, John, 88–9 Tyler, Evan, 270–1, 536–7 type foundries, 60–3, 70, 186 Ulysses (Joyce), 267 Union Star, 250 Universal Chronicle, 582 Universal Etymological Dictionary, 409 Universal Intelligence, 90, 479 Universal Journal, 463 Universal Journalist, 205 Universal London Morning Advertiser, 463 university market, 285 van Hilten, Jan, 196 verse see poetry and verse Vickery, Amanda, 417 Vincent, David, 104–5 Vint, John, 309 Virginia Journal and Alexandria Advertiser, 326 Voltaire, 378, 523

692

index

Volunteer Evening Post, 248 Volunteer’s Journal, 82, 248 Votes of the House of Commons, 245, 246, 532 Wales, 344–63 early pamphlets and newsbooks, 351–4 existing scholarship on Welsh news, 345–7; primary source material, 347–9 first English-language newspapers, 5, 361 informal news-sharing, 350–1, 354–5 Welch Mercury (1643–44), 202 Welsh almanacs, 355–6, 356–7, 362 Welsh-language press, 39, 355–62, 360 Walker, Henry, 178, 477 Walker, John, 215–16 Walker, Obadiah, 563 Wallace, James, 123 Walpole, Horace, 58 Walpole, (Sir) Robert, 33, 141, 224, 237, 390, 576, 580 Walter, John, 50–1, 62 Walter, John (II), 51, 60 Walters, Huw, 346, 359 Ward Clavier, Sarah, 345 Ward, Richard M., 501 Washington, George, 333, 379 Watchman, 44, 468 Waterford Journal, 254–5 Waters, Edward, 81 Watkyns, Rowland, 353 Watson, James, 54–5, 56, 71, 222, 268, 271–2, 276, 282, 288, 289, 290, 291 Watts, John, 70–1 Webster, Tom, 550 Weekly Intelligencer, 87–8 Weekly Journal (Applebee), 228 Weekly Journal or British Gazetteer, 183 Weekly Journal: or, Saturday’s Post (Mist), 141–2, 146, 210, 235–8, 388, 462 Weekly Magazine, or Edinburgh Amusement, 269, 277, 298, 301, 303 Weekly Medley, 455 Weekly Memorials: for the Ingenious, 429 Weekly newes from forraigne parts beyond the seas, 186 Weekly Post, 498–9 Weekly Register, 24, 47, 432 Weekly Review of the Affairs of France, 33 Weir, Alexander, 331 Welch Mercury, 202, 536 Welsh press see under Wales Welsh Trust, 108–9 Welwood, James, 452–3, 455, 460, 469

Western Flying Post, 376 Westminster Journal, 463, 464 Westminster Magazine, 466 Whalley, John, 81 Whatley, Stephen, 389 Wheale, Nigel, 105 Whig Magazine, 467 Whisperer, 466 White, Cynthia, 137 White, Grace, 56–7 White, John, 56 White, Mr (Norwich printer), 76 Whitehall Evening Post, 34, 47, 49, 228, 481 Whitley, Roger, 355 Whitrowe, Joan, 134–5 Wilkes, John, 43, 97–8, 98, 99, 142, 324, 380, 466 William III, King, 90–1, 538–45 Williams, Helen, 419, 420 Williams, Sir Watkin, 358, 361 Williamson, Joseph, 31, 151, 180, 534 Williamson, Peter (Indian Peter), 318–19 Williamson, Peter (publisher), 277, 307 Williamson’s (later Billinge’s) Liverpool Advertiser, 123 Wilson, Alexander, 61, 61–2 Wilson, Sir Daniel, 564 Windley, Lathan, 571 Wolfe, James, 236 women as advertisers, 211–12 general involvement in print news, 41–2 literacy patterns, 111–12 as news writers, 20, 134–5, 136–7, 550 publications intended for, 20–1, 135–7, 409–17 as publishers, 41–2, 56–7, 134–5, 140, 329, 416–17, 418–22 and subscription libraries, 117 see also midwifery treatises Wood, William, 247 Woodfall, Henry, 100, 581 Woods, Christopher, 266 Woodson, Carter G., 571 Worcester Journal, 361 Wotherspoon, John, 299 Wynne, Dr Owen, 354–5 Y Cylch-grawn Cynmraeg, 349, 359 Y Drych Cristianogawl, 345 York Chronicle, 421 York Courant, 222 York Mercury, 40, 56–7

Plate 1  Bound volume of past issues of the Athenian Gazette, 1693 (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin)

Plate 2  Mercurius Aulicus, 22 June 1644 (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin)

Plate 3  Title page of John Milton’s Areopagitica, 1644 (Creative Commons Licence, courtesy of Wikimedia)

Plate 4  Lady Mary Wortley Montagu by Charles Jervas (Creative Commons License, courtesy of Wikimedia)

Plate 5  Masthead of the Dublin Intelligence, with last-minute news in the right margin, 16 September 1710 (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin)

Plate 6  Title page of Anthony Daffy’s Elixir salutis: the choice drink of health or, healthbringing drink (Wellcome Collection, Public Domain Mark)

Plate 7  George Faulkner’s Dublin Journal, 23–26 May 1741 (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin)

Plate 8  Title page of The Ancient and Modern Scots Songs, 1769 (© National Library of Scotland, Glen.87)

Plate 9  Title page of Eikon Basilike, 1649 (Creative Commons Licence, courtesy of Wikimedia)

Plate 10  The Female Spectator, vol. 1, 3rd edition, 1747 (LSE Library, no restrictions, via Wikimedia Commons)

Plate 11  ‘A Review of Books’ in Samuel Johnson’s Literary Magazine, 1, 1756 (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin)

Plate 12  Issued at the time of the Popish Plot, the Pacquet of Advice from Rome was a successful anti-Catholic weekly targeted at ‘Protestant Gentlemen’ (Courtesy of Marsh’s Library, Dublin)