The English Press in the Eighteenth Century (Routledge Revivals)

Jeremy Black

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781136836299
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

First published in 1987, this is a comprehensive analysis of the rise of the British Press in the eighteenth century, as a component of the understanding of eighteenth century political and social history. Professor Black considers the reasons for the growth of the "print culture" and the relations of newspapers to magazines and pamphlets; the mechanics of circulation; and chronological developments.

Extensively illustrated with quotations from newspapers of the time, the book is a lively as well as original and informative treatment of a topic that must remain of first importance for the literate historian.

1
Development of the Metropolitan Press

The lapsing of the Licensing Act

We writers of essays, or (as they are termed) periodical papers, justly claim to ourselves a place among the modern improvers of literature. Neither Bentley nor Burman, nor any other equally sagacious commentator, has been able to discover the least traces of any similar productions among the ancients: except we can suppose, that the history of Thucydides was retailed weekly in six-penny numbers; that Seneca dealt out his morality every Saturday; or that Tulley wrote speeches and philosophical disquisitions, whilst Virgil and Horace clubbed together to furnish the poetry, for a Roman Magazine.

George Colman, Connoisseur, 14 February 1754

…certainly if the Parliament had at the Revolution,¹ looked upon the Liberty of the Press as so essential and sacred a Part of the Liberties of the Kingdom, as this Gentleman² and indeed almost all Writers have endeavoured to represent it, they would have cleared it of all Restraints that were laid upon it, as they did every other branch of publick Liberty. If the Press had ever been consider’d as the proper instrument to restrain the excesses and correct the misbehaviour of men in power, would it not have been claim’d and asserted in the Declaration of Rights, that was made to the Prince and Princess of Orange upon presenting them the Crown, in which all the Rights and Liberties of the subject were particularly enumerated and expressly demanded? But there is not one Syllable in it, as I can find, relating to the Liberty of the Press; that was a Thing not so much as dreamt of in those days.

Daily Gazetteer, 6 January 1738

The forceful reminder by the Daily Gazetteer, the leading newspaper supporting (and indeed subsidised by) Walpole’s Whig ministry in the later 1730s, that the framers of the Revolution Settlement of 1688–9 had neither evoked nor enforced the ‘Liberty of the Press’, however defined, was an accurate one though largely forgotten. In 1762 the Briton saw ‘the liberty of the press’ as a ‘consequence of the Revolution’. However, as the Daily Gazetteer pointed out, the legislation of the later Stuarts for controlling the press was maintained and in 1693 revived. The 1662 ‘Act for preventing the frequent Abuses in printing seditious, treasonable, and unlicensed Books and Pamphlets, and for regulating of Printing and Printing Presses’ had lapsed in 1679 at a time when Charles II’s control of Parliament had been tempered by the excitement generated by the Popish Plot, an exposé whose intoxicating rumours and slanders owed their propagation in great part to unregulated presses. Revived by James II in 1685, this Act was renewed in 1693 by a Parliament engaged in supporting William and Mary against the exiled James and his patron Louis XIV of France. Governments that take power through violence often maintain the apparatus and follow the methods of those they have discredited and replaced. In the case of William III, a Stuart by blood and an autocrat by disposition, this was far from surprising. Though the United Provinces (modern Netherlands), where William represented the monarchical component in the government, enjoyed the freest press in Europe this owed nothing to him. It was made a capital offence in the United Provinces to accuse William of aspiring to sovereignty and John Roth, one pamphleteer who continued to do so, was declared insane and confined for 14 years,³ a method of control happily absent from eighteenth-century British ministerial supervision of the newspapers.

The Printing Act of 1662, renewed in 1693, was far from permissive. Based on the theory that the freedom to print was hazardous to the community and dangerous to its ruler, a threat to faith, loyalty and morality, the Act sought to limit both the right and the ability to print. Printing was strictly limited to the master printers of the Stationers Company of London and the university printers. Only twenty of the former were permitted and vacancies were filled by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London, who were troubled enough by the dissemination of heterodox opinions not to support a relaxation in the control of printing. Only four founders of type were permitted and vacancies were again filled by the two senior clerics. All master printers and founders were obliged to provide sureties of £300 not to engage in illegal printing. The number of apprentices, journeymen and presses per printer was regulated. The printing of material offensive to the Christian faith, the Church of England, any officer of the government or any private person was prohibited and a licensing system established to enable pre-publication censorship. The Secretaries of State were given authority over publications dealing with ‘affairs of state’. This authority was delegated in 1663 to Sir Roger L’Estrange, who undertook it in return for the profitable patent for the exclusive publication of ‘all narratives or relacons not exceeding two sheets of paper and all advertisements, mercuries, diurnals, and books of public intelligence’. Existing newsbooks were suppressed to make way for L’Estrange’s. The competing schemes of Joseph Williamson, one of the Under-Secretaries, led to the breaching of L’Estrange’s monopoly with the publication of the Oxford Gazette in November 1665. This became the London Gazette, (or Gazette for short) the following year when the Court returned to London after the plague and L’Estrange sold his monopoly to Williamson. The Scottish Privy Council discouraged the printing of news relating to Scotland, and it was not until the Union and the abolition of the Council that the situation altered there.⁴

The Gazette was not the sole means of spreading news. Though the trade and advertising newspapers set up after the Fire of London of 1666 contained no political news,⁵ this was not the case with the manuscript newsletters. The lack of domestic news in the Gazette led readers who wanted political, and, in particular, parliamentary news to turn to newsletters.⁶ It was not until the Popish Plot that the Gazette’s monopoly in printed news was breached. Public excitement, political commitment and the expiration of the licensing provisions in 1679 led to a sudden proliferation of unlicensed newspapers. The first of these appeared on 3 December 1678, edited by Henry Care or Carr. The full-title made clear the didactic nature of the work:

The Weekly Pacquet of Advice from Rome: or, The History of Popery. A Deduction of the Usurpations of the Bishops of Rome, and the Errors and Superstitions by them from time to time brought into the Church. In the Process of which, The Papists Arguments are Answered, their Fallacies Detected, their Cruelties Registred, their Treasons and seditious Principles Observed, and the whole Body of Papistry Anatomized. Perform’d by a Single Sheet, coming out every Friday, but with a continual Connexion. To each being added, the Popish Courant: or, Some occasional Joco-serious Reflections on Romish Fopperies.

The introduction in the first number, addressed ‘To all true English Protestants, but especially those of the Cities of London and Westminster’, made clear the educational nature of the work and the hope that its form and cost would enable it to reach an extended readership:

Though I doubt not but you have generally been so well Educated, as to understand the grosser Tenets of the Apostasiz’d Roman Church, and look upon them with just Abhorrence; Yet possibly some of you, (especially the Younger or more Mechanick sort) may not have had leisure or opportunity to inspect the whole of that Mystery of Iniquity; or to know how to answer their Emissaries when privately… they shall seek to undermine your Faith with specious, but fallacious Arguments. To give you a thorough insight into the Doctrines and Practices of that dangerous Party, that none may be sillily seduc’d for want of due warning, or defensive Arms, shall be the scope of these successive sheets… Not in the least intending hereby to intrench on the Province of our Reverend Divines…but only to furnish meaner Capacities with such familiar Arguments, as every Judicious Christian ought to have at hand… This good Design may possibly seem contemptible, by being Attempted in a Pamphlet-course; but ’tis considered, though there be good Books enow abroad, yet every Mans Purse will not allow him to buy, nor his Time permit him to read, nor perhaps his Understanding reach to comprehend large and elaborate Treaties. This Method is therefore chosen, as most likely to fall into Vulgar hands, and more agreeable to their circumstance, who have most need of such Assistances.

For their penny a week readers were promised the use of mockery to obtain the paper’s ends, and the following number carried an advertisement accordingly:

These are to give notice to all that think themselves concerned, that there will shortly be exposed to sale by drops of Holywater, a couple of convenient Halters, Consecrated at St. Tyburn, put up at five Nobles a-piece, to advance a French Crown each bidding. There likewise may be had a choice second hand Coffin ready seasoned, and fit for use. If any frugal Gentleman have a mind to it, let him repair to the new appointed Colledge of Priests and Jesuits, near Pye-Corner, and they may know further.

The Popish Courant of 24 January 1679 reported ‘From the Laboratory of the Inquisition—A Catholick Pill to purge out Christianity’. Many of the characteristic features and devices of the eighteenth-century press were already present and fully developed. Eighteenth-century newspapers were characterised by a paranoid mentality, rigid convictions and a style that exploited humour: mock-advertisements, fictional creeds, such as that in the Popish Courant of 16 May 1679, and fake-prophecies. The Popish Courant of 15 August 1679 carried one, supposedly dating from Roman times, that attacked the Catholics and commented on contemporary politics. Each issue of the Weekly Pacquet began by stating what it was to contain, as some of the essay papers were to do the following century. In 1679 the publisher of the paper, Langley Curtis, produced a collected edition. In the preface he stressed the need for zeal and truth in the fight with Catholicism: ‘You have need of knowledge, because your Enemy is subtle to deceive; and of Zeal, because your Contest is of the greatest Importance in the world.’ Curtis also rejected criticism of the nature of his work ‘as if Sense and Reason were confin’d to Folio’s, and could not be delivered but in vast cumbersome Tracts’.

The preface to the second collected volume, which appeared in 1680, returned to the same theme. Ignorance was a peril, ‘the Mother and Nurse of Romish Devotion’. Attacking it through a newspaper was likely to be the most effective method, ‘that it might the better and more easily fall into the hands and hearts of the middle or meaner Rank; who having not time nor Coin to Buy or peruse chargeable, tedious, and various Books, might readily and cheaply be furnished here with a General Scheme of Popery’.

The upsurge in press activity during the Popish Plot and the Exclusion Crisis was unwelcome to the government. It brought back memories of the collapse of Charles I’s personal rule and the virulent press of the 1640s. By the end of 1679 more papers were being published than at any time since 1649.⁷ A Tory press directed against the opposition Whigs was founded, ‘a whole kennel of Popish Yelpers’,⁸ including such papers as Heraclitus Ridens, the Observator and the Weekly Discovery. However, Charles II wished not to conduct a propaganda war but to terminate one. As the 1662 Act had lapsed Charles turned to his judiciary to ascertain his regulating powers under the prerogative, and was rewarded with the opinion that the crown could, without seeking parliamentary assistance, prohibit ‘the printing and publishing of all news-books and pamphlets of news whatsoever not licenced by His Majesty’s authority’.⁹ A proclamation was accordingly issued and prosecutions for sed...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Preface
• 1. Development of the Metropolitan Press
• 2. ‘As Full As an Egg’: Balancing the Contents of the Press
• 3. Holding Up the Truest Portraits of Men’s Minds
• 4. Sources and Distribution; Cost and Circulation
• 5. The Press and the Constitution
• 6. Controlling the Press: Censorship and Subsidies
• 7. The Press and Europe
• 8. English Enlightenment or Fillers? Improvement, Morality and Religion
• 9. Conclusion: A Changing Press Altering Society?
• Bibliography