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

by Andrew Pettegree

  Wilkes did not take this too seriously. Challenged by James Boswell for his abuse of Samuel Johnson when they met on neutral ground in Italy, Wilkes was happy to admit that he held a high opinion of Johnson in private: but ‘I make it a rule to abuse him who is against me or any of my friends.’5 Here was journalism concerned not with the transmission of news, but as a vehicle of partisan invective. The North Briton existed ‘to plant daggers in certain breasts’. Not all his victims would show the same insouciance, but Wilkes did not lack personal courage, and a well-publicised duel with one outraged aristocratic victim, Earl Talbot, only served to enhance his fame. When the ministry attempted to silence him with the promise of office, Wilkes ensured that this too became known.

  Much of this would have been familiar from the ferocious press campaign against Walpole. Where Wilkes truly broke new ground was in associating these criticisms with the king personally. In the infamous number 45 of The North Briton, Wilkes denounced the king's speech, delivered on behalf of the monarch at the opening of Parliament, with unprecedented freedom:

  Every friend of this country must lament that a prince of so many great and amiable qualities, whom England truly reveres, can be brought to give the sanction of his sacred name to the most odious measures …. I wish as much as any man in the kingdom to see the honour of the crown maintained in a manner truly becoming royalty. I lament to see it sunk even to prostitution.6

  This could not be allowed to go unanswered. The ministry now issued a general warrant for the arrest of anyone connected with the publication. This raised the stakes. Until this point The North Briton had been the tool of what was, in essence, a dispute within the political elite. Now with the arrest of his publisher, printer, journeymen and hawkers (forty-nine in all), Wilkes had the opportunity he craved to test an issue of real importance: the limits of press freedom.

  The legal actions revolved around two issues: whether Wilkes as a Member of Parliament enjoyed immunity from arrest for a libel (albeit a heinous one); and the validity of a general warrant, which named the crime rather than listing the alleged perpetrators by name. On both points The North Briton was triumphantly vindicated. Its printers were freed and awarded substantial damages for wrongful arrest. Wilkes became a celebrity. Before his trial Wilkes had fretted that his face was hardly known to the general public. Now the deficiency was repaired, first by a hostile but widely circulated print by William Hogarth (a Tory, and an enemy). Soon his features seemed to be everywhere: on broadside ballads celebrating his release, stamped on porcelain dishes, teapots and tobacco papers.7 Such were the fruits of fame in eighteenth-century London. Despite muddying the waters with a conviction for obscenity and flight abroad, Wilkes continued to attract considerable loyalty. His fight to be allowed to take his seat as an MP for Middlesex in 1768 and 1769 made his a national cause.

  The emboldened press now pushed forward on other fronts. The London Daily Post and General Advertiser was largely an advertising paper until new editors, Henry Woodfall and his son Henry Sampson Woodfall, gave it a new lease of life. Rebranded as The Public Advertiser, their key innovation, to accompany the paper's enhanced coverage of domestic politics, was a series of trenchant political essays, published anonymously as the Letters of Junius. Strongly anti-ministerial in tone, in 1769 a letter addressed to the king resulted in the arrest of the younger Woodfall and several other editors whose papers had reprinted what was, in truth, an astonishingly direct and personal attack. ‘It is the misfortune of your life,’ Junius informed the king, ‘that you should never have been acquainted with the language of truth, until you have heard it in the complaints of your people.’8

  16.1 The fruits of celebrity. John Wilkes immortalised in enamel.

  Three editors were committed to trial. Lord Chief Justice Mansfield directed the jury to convict, on the grounds that the judge alone could determine whether a seditious libel had occurred. The jury had solely to establish whether the accused were responsible for its publication. The jury's stubborn refusal to follow this direction drastically rewrote the law of libel and much diminished its usefulness as a tool of press control. Though convictions for seditious libel still hung over the press, English regimes now had to be assured of a sympathetic jury, and not just a compliant judge; a much more demanding test.

  Thus far the papers had directed their attacks at the conduct of government, a cause in which they could usually rely on the support of disaffected factions in the political elite. Now attention shifted to the prerogatives of Parliament itself. The right to publish Parliamentary proceedings had been a contested issue for over a century, ever since reporting had been encouraged by the Parliamentary opposition to Charles I in 1640. This freedom had been withdrawn by Charles II on the Restoration, and periodically reaffirmed and removed thereafter. This was generally an opposition cause, and one easily abandoned if the opposition found itself in power. The papers chipped away, publishing ‘extracts’ of speeches which frequently owed more to the imagination of the writer than any real knowledge of what had been said. Samuel Johnson, who built a considerable reputation as a Parliamentary reporter, confessed to friends that a much admired speech of the Elder Pitt was entirely Johnson's work: ‘that speech I wrote in a garret in Exeter Street’.9

  The matter came to a head in 1771, when the printer of the admirably named Middlesex Journal or Chronicle of Liberty was summoned with others to answer the charge of having printed the debates of the House of Commons in contravention of regulations. Wilkes, now a London magistrate, was able through shameless manipulation of the legal process to ensure that the case was struck down, on the ground that the alleged offence contravened no statute, but only a proclamation that violated inalienable rights. Rather than risk outright confrontation with London opinion, Parliament backed down. No further attempt was made to impede the reporting of Parliamentary debates; though, since note-taking remained forbidden, journalists were still forced to rely on imperfect memory and lively imagination.10

  These three great set-piece confrontations together constituted a remarkable breakthrough for the principle of a free press, and the rights it should enjoy both to report the news and offer opinion (and, indeed, pungent criticism). At the beginning of the eighteenth century Chief Justice Holt could argue that criticism of the government was criminal, because ‘it is very necessary for all governments that the people should have a good opinion of it’.11 Sixty years later such a view was redundant; it had become axiomatic that ‘statesmen may be corrected in their blunders, or chastened for their villainy’ by the press.12 A man like John Wilkes could only have survived – indeed, thrived – because of this sea change in attitudes. It protected him from the consequences of a wild impudence that a generation before would surely have brought about his downfall.

  How the press would use these new freedoms would remain to be seen. For some it seemed that the papers had merely won the right to be incredibly rude. When in 1772 The Middlesex Journal offered this comment on a proposed royal progress, it would have seemed to many that established boundaries of respect and propriety had been dissolved:

  His majesty, we are told, intends to make the tour of England. Weak as he is, he has got more wisdom. He knows too well the contempt or detestation in which he is held in all parts of the Kingdom, to expose himself to the neglect or insults he would everywhere meet with. Instead of travelling through England, he will bury himself at Kew.13

  The best hope for politicians was that this rampant press might be drawn off the scent by other more alluring quarry. In the summer of 1776, for instance, one might have thought that the papers would have been consumed by anxious introspection at the portentous events unfolding in the American colonies. In fact, for several months London was preoccupied with two extraordinary (and interlinked) trials: the prosecution of the Duchess of Kingston for bigamy, and the subsequent trial of the comic dramatist Samuel Foote, her principal persecutor, for sodomy. In the case of the duchess no great legal issues were at stake. Depending on th
e outcome she would either be duchess or, if her first marriage was proved, Countess of Bristol. But for the trial of a peeress by the entire House of Lords, Westminster Hall was crammed and sittings of the House of Commons were suspended. Foote, who had made a fortune, and many enemies, by his impersonations of society figures, commanded less attention, but at least he was acquitted (after an extraordinary personal intervention by the king).14 In London, as in contemporary Paris, theatre played a crucial role in the development of a celebrity culture, as well as providing an increasing amount of copy for the voracious newspapers.

  There is no doubt that a reinvigorated and saucy press was more attractive to readers. In the last decades of the eighteenth century politics became a national sport. Just as in the 1760s and 1770s the prolonged controversy over Wilkes's membership of the House of Commons achieved considerable coverage in the provincial papers, from the 1780s onwards a robust campaign for Parliamentary reform won advocates in the press throughout the nation.15 The provincial papers generally stuck to their routine of weekly publication. The London press, in contrast, was increasingly dominated by daily news. These papers were now a successful part of the political scene; they were also increasingly professional in their deft integration of political comment with advertising, society gossip and foreign news. The outlines of the mature newspaper were gradually emerging from the turmoil of metropolitan politics and commercial life.

  16.2 The notorious Samuel Foote. His form of political satire eventually made him too many influential enemies.

  A Family Divided

  This transformation in the English press owed a great deal to the reinvigorated interest in politics: not least, through the prolonged crisis with the American colonies. But it was surely significant – and a real milestone – that even this first traumatic challenge to the integrity of British imperial power did not bring about a retreat into dull loyalism. The crisis of American identity stimulated a real debate in England, where the colonists’ insistence on their own rights and prerogatives found many English defenders.

  Approaching the American Revolution through the history of the press brings home that this was always a family feud, and all the more painful for that. The sense of kinship ran very deep, a connection that made the disputes that festered through the 1760s so bitter and bewildering. The umbilical cord to London wholly shaped the early history of American newspapers: London was the source of news, and its papers the model to be emulated.

  Newspapers developed only very haltingly in the American colonies.16 Although Boston had a printer as early as 1634, it was not until 1690 that an attempt was made to establish a news periodical, and this, Benjamin Harris's Publick Occurrences Both Forreign and Domestick, was suppressed after just one issue. It was only in 1704 that, with the support of the authorities, the local postmaster John Campbell was allowed to begin distributing his Boston News-Letter. Like the earliest European newspaper, Campbell was here mechanising an existing service, since the postmaster had already learned to exploit his privileged position as distributor of incoming despatches by sending a regular manuscript newsletter to favoured clients. His printed weekly newspaper scarcely deviated from this model. The Boston News-Letter was throughout his custodianship essentially a digest of European and primarily London news.

  Campbell was not an ideal news man. Cantankerous and given to self-pity, if he believed his readers did not appreciate his efforts he would write long self-justifying notices to say so. But his vision of what a newspaper should be proved deeply influential. Benjamin Harris, the battle-scarred London controversialist whose newspaper had been so quickly suppressed in 1690, had attempted to engage the local community in debate about Boston affairs. Campbell, in contrast, published very little local news. The Boston News-Letter was a scrupulous and often scrupulously dull litany of despatches extracted from London papers. So determined was he not to deviate from this programme that his reports of European news fell steadily behind. By 1719 he was meticulously reporting European events over a year old.

  This was taking the principle of the journal of record to bizarre extremes, and thankfully other colonial news men did not feel the same compulsion. From 1719 Campbell had a Boston competitor, and papers were established shortly thereafter in Philadelphia, New York, Newport and Charleston. But none broke free from the preoccupation with European affairs. Analysis of the contents of The Pennsylvania Gazette between 1723 and 1765 reveals that over this extended period 70 per cent of news items were devoted to continental Europe and the British Isles.17

  For all that, geography and logistics ultimately mandated that American newspapers would evolve in different ways to their European progenitors. The sheer distance between communities, strung out along a rocky coastline in colonies of different settlement patterns, created a series of largely self-contained markets. And notwithstanding the preoccupation with European affairs, the long winter season during which the transatlantic passage was interrupted meant that the stream of London papers was for several months abruptly terminated. The papers were obliged to seek more imaginative solutions to fill their pages: advertisements, correspondence, witty and diverting articles. The 1730s saw a wave of what might be termed literary papers. There was also increasing comment on local political controversies, such as the great immunisation debate that convulsed Boston in the 1720s.18

  The period before 1740 also witnessed a slow but perceptible rise in the amount of news from other colonies. In this way the newspapers played an important part in the growth of an American inter-colonial community consciousness. But the community of shared values was essentially trans-atlantic. The social assumptions of the early American readership – a strong belief in Protestantism, property, retributive justice, the virtues of family, hard work and the superiority of the English over all other nations – these were virtually indistinguishable from those of the Englishmen who would have been reading, a few months earlier, largely the same news.

  This made the quarrel, when it came, all the more destructive. The proximate cause was a European conflict fought largely on the American continent, the Seven Years War of 1756–63. Because the fighting was so much closer to home, this greatly increased coverage in colonial papers of events in the western hemisphere. This crisis also inspired one of the most memorable images of the colonial era, Benjamin Franklin's representation of the colonies as a severed snake, with the caption ‘Join, or Die.’ Ironically in its first manifestation, this cartoon (plausibly the first on the American continent) was pro-British: an admonition to the colonies to combine in their own defence or face destruction at the hands of the French. Its debut was modest enough, tucked away with little fanfare on the second page of Franklin's Pennsylvania Gazette.19 But it was soon taken up and reprinted in papers in New York and Boston.20 Rediscovered at the time of the Stamp Act Crisis, it would pass into history as one of the most potent patriot rallying cries.

  The Seven Years War left the British victorious, but with an empty treasury. The territorial gains in the Americas had to be defended by a permanent military presence. It was to pay for this that the British Parliament determined to raise new revenues, laid partly on the colonies. One way of doing this was to tax colonial newspapers in the same way that English papers were taxed: by requiring them to use stamped, that is specially authorised and certified, paper.

  If the Stamp Act crisis of 1765 proved one thing, it was that the press is never more eloquent, self-righteous and clamorous in the defence of liberty than when its own economic interests are concerned. Perhaps the English administration had been lulled by the experience of the imposition of the English stamp duty in 1712. Despite prognostications of the direst consequences the English press had absorbed the tax obligation with relatively little turbulence.21 But the American press did not have the same deep roots, and securing supplies of the stamped paper from London posed extra logistical difficulties. The duty was repealed within a year, but American opinion, deftly marshalled by the press, had experienced its first taste o
f success.22

  16.3 Join, or Die. Benjamin Franklin's inspired piece of pro-British propaganda.

  The Stamp Act crisis was also decisive in one other way. The short but furious agitation had engaged the loyalties of most of the established papers, though often initially with some reluctance. The partisan tone of the agitation, which would continue through the next decade of revolutionary controversies, ran wholly contrary to the established traditions of the colonial press. As colonial newspapers were, most usually, the only papers serving a community, their proprietors had striven, above all, to avoid giving offence.23 A studied neutrality in local political controversy, made possible by the relatively limited coverage of local political news, had served them well. This could be presented as a point of principle, enunciated most famously by Benjamin Franklin in his Apology for printers (1731). ‘Printers are educated in the belief,’ he wrote, ‘that when men differ in opinion, both sides ought equally to have the advantage of being heard by the public.’24 The new temper of the times left no room for such Olympian sentiments. Printers exhibiting an insufficient zeal for the cause of liberty found subscriptions cancelled, and a chilly reception from former friends. Charleston's Peter Timothy found himself transformed from ‘the most popular’ to ‘the most unpopular man in the province’.25 In Charleston as elsewhere local patriots supported the establishment of a rival paper, warmer in the cause of liberty. Many printers were reluctant patriots. But the passions of public debate were too strong for the old ways.

  In this sense the overwhelmingly patriot tone of the press during the Revolution was not always the result of free choice. Whereas the freedom of the press was vehemently proclaimed as a fundamental principle of the revolutionary movement, it was widely understood that this should not extend to the publication of sentiments injurious to the public good.26 The careful distinctions enunciated by patriot authors were more rudely enforced by the populace, who installed their own form of popular censorship, harrying printers insufficiently enthusiastic for revolutionary politics and, if necessary smashing their shops and ruining the type.