The Invention of News: How the World Came to Know About Itself

by Andrew Pettegree

  15.2 Edward Collier, The Letter Rack. The writing and communication media of the late seventeenth century presented as a still-life tableau.

  Although Garnier catered mostly for customers with low disposable income – he was a specialist in the coarse and cheaply produced books known collectively as the Bibliothèque bleue – these manuals were extremely popular.30 Together he held in stock some 5,832 copies of these three titles. For his normal customer base they would have been a curious purchase: model letters exchanged between persons of civility and social stature could scarcely have been of practical use to the artisans and tradesmen who patronised the Bibliothèque bleue. A number of these volumes had been continuously in print for over a century. Yet as time went on enterprising publishers also began to compile collections of letters more carefully adapted to the real practical needs of the new corresponding classes. One such was the Letters written to and for particular friends, a collection of 272 model letters assembled and published by the London publisher Samuel Richardson. The book was successful enough, but entirely overshadowed by another of Richardson's ventures in this same year: Pamela, or virtue rewarded, a novel in which the narrative proceeded entirely through a series of personal letters. Encapsulating the new vogue for correspondence, the epistolary novel became an eighteenth-century sensation, offering a breathless window on the intimate lives of their protagonists while exploiting the established reputation of the letter as a truth-bearing medium.

  The eighteenth-century rage for correspondence opened up an important new flank of the communication network, and it would be reasonable to hope that these letters, which survive in private and public archives in hundreds of thousands, would be a rich source of news reporting. In fact this does not prove to be the case. Those neophyte writers who entered the world of correspondence in this period did not on the whole use their letters for discussions of public affairs; one can work one's way through many hundreds of these letters and find only a meagre harvest of comment on the news, beyond the intimate, purely familial and business transactions.31 There are good practical reasons why this should have been so. In the first place the use of the postal system, though now far simpler and far more reliable, was still expensive. The cost of letters was carefully gradated to the weight of the package and the distance they would be carried. Only a small proportion was delivered post-paid. For many correspondents the joy of receiving a letter was tempered by the need to find ready cash to pay for it; and this could be a considerable sum. Although letters moved smoothly enough along the postal routes, arrangements for delivery from the depot on their arrival were often rudimentary. Only habitual correspondents (mostly business users) would make regular visits to the post office to pick up mail.

  Use of the postal system would therefore remain through this period a carefully weighed expenditure for most letter writers. In colonial Philadelphia Benjamin Franklin thought it perfectly reasonable that his wife should forebear writing a letter of consolation to her recently widowed sister on grounds of cost.32 While many more people were using the post, a very large proportion were tradesmen and business users. A survey of 608 letters despatched from Paris between 1830 and 1865 (and kept in the Musée de la poste as evidence of franking practice) reveals that only 15 per cent of the corpus were of a personal nature. The rest concerned commercial or banking transactions (47 per cent) or were letters from notaries and advocates concerning legal business (38 per cent).33 These, of course, were the intended users of the post: most of the government-led improvements in postal services of the eighteenth century were justified on commercial grounds.34 These business users tended to follow the conventions and models laid down in the letter-writing manuals with particular care, betraying the fragile social self-confidence of neophyte correspondents. There was little space for digression, opinion or gossip.

  The eighteenth century did witness significant changes in epistolary style. Whereas in the sixteenth century the emphasis had been on the display of formal rhetorical training, the eighteenth century strayed more easily into the familiar and familial. Letters, it was now thought, should give ‘a true picture of the heart’.35 This was all the more the case as letter-writing became increasingly feminised, encouraged not only by writing manuals directed specifically at female readers, but by the female protagonists in the epistolary novels. But this newly emboldened class of literate and educated female writers seldom strayed into the political domain. These were, in any case, the members of literate society most likely to be outside news circles; and they were not encouraged by social convention to share their opinions. Many such letters kept to the safe ground of family matters, small domestic dramas, servants and local diversions, the weather – or the receipt of other letters.

  In terms of their contribution to the news networks, the new letter writers of the eighteenth century were probably most important in their enthusiastic interaction with new forms of news periodicals: journals, magazines and newspapers. All newspapers carried copy derived from letters, whether official despatches reprinted in their entirety or letters from their own subscribers. Readers bombarded the editorial office with their comments, complaints and suggestions; this was a form of letter that could often be hand-delivered, and therefore involved minimum expense on the part of the correspondent. The burden of this incoming mail – The London Gazette claimed to have received 861 letters in four months in 176136 – must have been very considerable, particularly when set alongside numerous other claims on an editor's time. But the readers could not be ignored. Sometimes they offered snippets of news for inclusion. Particularly in towns off the main news networks these could be extremely useful; but relying on volunteer enthusiasts had its dangers, as publishers were all too aware. ‘We are assured from Shrewsbury,’ wrote the editor of the Birmingham Gazette in May 1749, ‘that the account sent from thence, and inserted in this paper, in relation to the fireworks there, was an entire falsehood.’37 The safest course, in reporting an apparent sensation, was to name the informant, and thus distance the paper from any accusation of unprofessional credulity. Thus in The British Spy, or Derby Postman of 1727:

  One Thomas Bostock of Buzlum near Newcastle under Lime, gives us the following narrative, viz. he says that a noted farmer living at Wiln-House … having a daughter about five or six years old, the girl has for as many weeks past seen, and still continues to see some daemon, spectre or airy composure assuming human shape, but of little magnitude, and imperceptible to all but his child.38

  Keeping their subscribers satisfied was not an easy task, and some editors occasionally allowed their impatience to show. Readers were particularly insistent in proposing their own literary effusions, for which they hoped the paper would find room. Although newspapers usually only turned to them in desperation, when they had insufficient news to fill their pages, these seem to have been genuinely popular features. In this way it was readers who moved papers away from exclusive concentration on news to a more varied diet of features and soft items increasingly familiar to them from magazines. These would, in the future, be an important part of the more rounded mix of news and entertainment that became an essential element of the newspapers’ appeal in the centuries to come.

  The Theatre of Current Events

  On the whole, then, private correspondence is a frustrating and disappointing resource for writing a history of news; or, indeed, for trying to establish how these newly empowered eighteenth-century citizens reacted to the ebb and flow of current events. We can expect attention to politics only in the circles of upper-class correspondents: much the same people who would have used their letters to share news of recent events from the sixteenth century onwards. Sometimes the mix of news, gossip and personal information we are offered from these correspondents can be a little disconcerting. Remarks on riots, famine or the execution of notorious criminals are interspersed with society scandal or complaints about pinching shoes. Crime and punishment attracted especial interest, particularly in Paris where the fashion for attending pu
blic executions had been eagerly embraced by upper-class society. This led to considerable competition for windows that overlooked the prisoner's route or, still better, the actual place of suffering.39 This was particularly the case when the condemned was also high-born. In 1699 the wife of a counsellor of the Parlement of Paris, Madame Ticquet, was accused of hiring men to murder her husband, a crime to which she ultimately confessed. On the day of her execution at the notorious Place de Grève, Paris high society turned out in force to see her die. According to Anne Marguerite du Noyer, who knew the prisoner, ‘the entire court and the city ran to see this spectacle’. Some houses with a good view ‘brought more money to their owners than they had ever cost them’.

  Du Noyer reported events rather like a visit to the theatre where she had secured a prime seat; and happily the principal actor was prepared to put on a good show:

  I was in the windows of the Hôtel de Ville, and I saw poor Mme Ticquet arrive around five o'clock in the evening, dressed in white …. One would have said that she had studied her role, because she kissed the chopping block and attended to all the other particulars as if it were simply a matter of performing in a play. In the end, one had never seen such self-possession, and the curé of Saint-Sulpice said that she died a true Christian heroine. The hangman was so moved that he missed [her head] and had to repeat his job five times before he managed to behead her …. Thus ended the beautiful Mme Ticquet, who was the ornament of all Paris.40

  Twenty years later Paris prepared to witness the execution of the notorious Cartouche, convicted of running a massive criminal enterprise in the city. The scale and sensational nature of his crimes, along with the insouciance with which he faced the horror of being broken on the wheel ('a bad quarter of an hour passes quickly'), combined to create a media circus. Even before he came to trial the actors of the Comédie française considered staging a play based on his life and crimes. Some thought this in bad taste, but the play went ahead. The Mercure, which had previously condemned the enterprise, thought it ‘very funny’. After conviction and sentencing, Cartouche was remitted to questioning, in the hope that he would name his accomplices; nevertheless spectators flocked to the Place de Grève for fear of missing the dramatic denouement. Even after his execution, Cartouche fever took time to subside. ‘For several days,’ reported a breathless Caumartin de Boissy to his sister, ‘no one has spoken of anything but Cartouche.’ The Regent's own mother, the Duchess of Orléans, recorded: ‘I ran into the comte d'Hoïm and the chevalier de Schaub. They told me about Cartouche having been executed yesterday; this detained me for quite a while.’41

  These events, and their reporting, serve as a vivid reminder that even in the eighteenth century the dissemination of news still relied on a vivid collage of eyewitness accounts, correspondence and word of mouth alongside the new printed media. They also offer a sobering view of the emotional temper of Enlightenment Europe. Of course, this sense of an execution as public entertainment was not exclusive to France, though the more routine executions at London's Tyburn tended to attract a more rowdy, less socially exclusive clientele.42 But it fell well short of the original intention, which was for a community to come together to witness and affirm the justice of an offender's punishment: a form of ritual expulsion intended to heal a community.43 In the eighteenth century, an age that prided itself on rational sensibility, this dry-eyed enjoyment of human suffering seemed especially jarring. Louis XIV reproved several of the ladies of the court for their presence at the execution of Madame Ticquet; if human beings were compassionate, women were meant to be the epitome of this emotion. A significant turning point seems to have arrived with the execution of Robert-François Damiens, convicted of attempting to kill Louis XV. He was subjected to the traditional punishment for regicides. His flesh was torn with hot pincers and the wounds filled with molten lead and oil, after which he was torn apart by four teams of horses.44

  Crowds gathered in the square from the previous evening to watch this spectacle. Those who could find no place lined the streets from Notre Dame, where Damiens had made his last confession. The torture lasted for several hours: the horses strained for an hour and a half before they could detach a limb. This obscene performance seems finally to have mobilised philosophers and penal reformers against such festivals of retribution. The search began for a more rational and clinical means of executing justice: still in public, but without the baroque ceremonies and careful gradations of crime and rank that had previously attended executions.

  The result, after thirty-five years of debate, was the adoption, in 1792, of a new decapitation machine: a killing device for the age of reason. This, to be applied equally to all condemned without distinction of status, would sweep away all of the macabre ritual that had previously attended the executioner's craft, and consign justice to a simple, easily replicated device, soon dubbed the guillotine after the distinguished doctor who had first designed a prototype. The first execution drew a large crowd but proved rather a disappointment. There was little to see and events proceeded so quickly that the crowd began chanting, ‘bring me back my wooden gallows, bring me back my gallows’.45

  What the disappointed viewers did not realise was that they had witnessed the debut of one of the principal actors in the concluding news event of this era, the French Revolution; an event that would both create the first generation of celebrity journalist/politicians and move the reporting of news, and the development of a news market, into quite uncharted waters.

  CHAPTER 16

  Cry Freedom

  THE mid-eighteenth century had been a period of consolidation for the European press. The development of the weekly journal and monthly magazines extended the range of comment and reflection on political topics. The number of newspapers expanded gradually, as new titles were established and existing papers failed; markets were sustained by a steadily rising tide of new readers. Publishers could earn a good living from providing subscribers with a weekly or thrice-weekly diet of news. But this was not a period of enormous innovation in the news market. In Britain, Parliamentary politics (now settled into an established pattern of annual sessions) ensured that intermittent crises of faction or policy could bring sudden spasms of press fury. A newspaper campaign undoubtedly helped force a humiliating retreat for the ministry in the excise crisis of 1737, and generated a passionate intensity in the opposition to Walpole; but after his fall in 1742 the fizz went out of the bottle. In France the Gazette sailed serenely on, protected from competition. The most rapid growth in press activity was away from the major centres of population: in English and French provincial towns (in the latter, it must be said, largely apolitical advertising journals) and in the American colonies.1 More and more middle-sized communities were served by a single newspaper, usually faithfully modelled on the papers of the metropolitan hubs. By adopting the style of the cosmopolitan centre, on which they largely relied for copy, these papers succeeded by a conscious lack of innovation. An authentic local voice had yet to be developed.

  In the last decades of the eighteenth century, and with remarkable rapidity, this busy, prosperous but rather undemanding news world was completely reshaped. In France, England and the American colonies new political controversies brought both a changed role for the press and a vast increase in the number and circulation of newspapers. For the first time, newspapers played a vital role not only in recording but in shaping political events. It was a critical milestone on the road to a recognisably modern newspaper industry.

  Wilkes and Liberty

  For the Enlightenment philosopher, John Wilkes made a rather unlikely champion.2 Unscrupulous, devious and nakedly ambitious, Wilkes combined a rackety private life with a cavalier attitude to public affairs. Continuously in debt and careless of friends and obligations, in the middle years of a hitherto undistinguished career Wilkes discovered both a cause and a flair for publicity. That cause would be the freedom of the press. By the time he had concluded his long struggle the acceptable boundaries of public debate,
and the part of the newspapers in the political process, had been radically redrawn.

  Wilkes was lucky to be feeling his way towards a public career at a moment when the accession of a new king, George III, had brought a revival of party politics. The change of monarch caused an inevitable turbulence in the governing elite, as the king sought to impose his own stamp on affairs; determined to play an active part in government, George III chose to be advised by Lord Bute, a brittle and sensitive Scot not afraid to use the patronage powers of government to reward his friends and punish his enemies. The discontents of the dispossessed Whigs found a political cause in the negotiations for the unpopular peace that would in 1763 end the Seven Years War. Wilkes was happy to be their most pungent instrument.

  Wilkes's famous political paper, The North Briton, was a direct response to Bute's attempt to cultivate opinion through his own recently established organ, The Briton.3 Wilkes opened the first issue with a high-minded defence of the principle of a free press, ‘the firmest bulwark of the liberties of this country … the terror of bad ministers’. But if this seemed to promise elevated political philosophy, Wilkes's journalistic principles were better encapsulated by a typically frank avowal to his financial backer, Lord Temple: ‘no political paper would be relished by the public unless well-seasoned with personal satire’.4 The North Briton was relentlessly rude, personal and daringly outspoken. Fed a constant stream of damaging information by his Whig allies, a well-sourced exposé of embezzlement in the army concluded with a frantic denunciation of the Secretary of State: ‘the most treacherous, base, selfish, mean, abject, low-lived and dirty fellow that ever wriggled himself into a secretaryship’.