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

by Andrew Pettegree

  Wallington's pamphlets were assembled for a particular purpose, the creation of a historical narrative to enable ‘the generation to come [to] see what God hath done’. The journal would teach posterity the trials undergone by the children of God. And Wallington felt these trials very acutely, as the fighting took its toll: the death of an apprentice, the loss of a close friend. Where the personal meets the political, the news networks did not always function smoothly. Only in 1643, in a section devoted to Catholic atrocities in Ireland, could Wallington record the death of a brother-in-law, murdered two years previously. Presumably only now was he receiving this grim news.

  Wallington was a sophisticated reader. Sometimes he would transcribe from news-books accounts of events he had attended in person: here he used his notebooks to marshal and order his recollections. His detailed narrative of the war years provides a gripping contemporary history, compiled largely from his collection of pamphlets and his own experiences. Few were as committed as our master turner to bringing order to current events; in a world view shaped by piety his notebooks served as a means to record and divine God's ineffable purposes for humanity.

  First among Equals

  Like Nehemiah Wallington, Samuel Sewall was a committed churchman. Before his marriage he had trained at Harvard and originally intended ordination, and the imprint of his theological training remained with him for life. He was a regular and judicious attender of sermons, often twice on Sunday, and a rigorous defender of the Sabbath. Boston's leading ministers were among his closest friends. As commissioner of the local court of judiciary one of Sewall's first duties was to participate in the condemnation of the accused in the famous Salem witch trials. He quickly came to regret his part in this dark business, and he was the only judge to publicly repudiate his role, standing bare-headed before his congregation while his minister read out a formal act of contrition.19

  Sewall began his diary at the age of twenty-one, and continued it until the last year of his life: a span of over fifty years. During this time Boston was transformed from an insular provincial place to a bustling Georgian city. Sewall remained faithful to the values of the old school, but his patent integrity and lack of personal vanity ensured that he retained the respect of the whole community.

  As a member of Boston's commercial and political elite, Sewall had access to the best sources of information. He was an avid reader of the incoming mails, and, as we have seen, he eagerly welcomed the publication of Boston's first weekly newspaper. He subscribed to the paper throughout his lifetime, and bound successive issues into neat volumes for inclusion in his library. But for all his delight in this refined specimen of European sophistication, what he read in The Boston News-Letter seemed to have had only a marginal impact on his news world. As we can see from his diary, even before the coming of the newspaper Sewall had been at the centre of a series of interlocking news networks: family, commercial, the judicial circuit and colonial government.

  When Sewall moved into his father-in-law's house after his marriage he immediately joined a substantial news hub. Visitors and messengers brought information from family members settled in farms and settlements around Massachusetts Bay. At times of crisis Sewall would have been one of the first to know of threats to what was still a frontier society. When a messenger in 1690 brought news of an Indian assault, Sewall wrote immediately to his father and brother. Even the wedding party of Sewall's son, who was marrying the Governor's daughter, was briefly interrupted so the Governor could read aloud a letter from his own son (the colony's Attorney General) describing the business that had kept him away: the capture of a pirate.20

  Pirates and their fate feature regularly in Sewall's diary. As a judge he was often concerned with their trials, and as a merchant trading in export goods he was acutely conscious of the threat they posed to the colony's economy. Despite this he was, more often than not, on the side of mercy. Possessed of an enviably robust constitution, Sewall travelled incessantly, riding out of Boston on commercial business or as a judge on circuit. A single entry from relatively early in the diary gives a sense of the rich intermingling of his circles of acquaintance, and their role as conduits of news:

  Joshua Moodey and self set out for Ipswich. I lodge at Sparkes's. Next day, Feb 12, go to lecture which Mr Moodey preaches, then I dine with Mr Cobbet, and so ride to Newbury; visit Mr Richardson sick of the dry bellyache. Monday, Feb 16, get Mr Philips and Payson to town and so keep a fast day. Mr Moodey preaching forenoon, Mr Phillips afternoon, Mr Woodbridge and Payson assisting in prayer; was a pretty full Assembly, Mr Moodey having given notice the Sabbath day, on which he preached all day. At Wenham and Ipswich, as we went, we were told of the earthquake in those parts and at Salem (Feb 8) the Sabbath before about the time of ending afternoon exercise. That which most was sensible of was a startling doleful sound; but many felt the shaking also.21

  17.2 The Boston News-Letter. A slavish imitation of The London Gazette, down to the sub-heading and style of date.

  Sewall, like Wallington, was an unsceptical recorder of natural phenomena and heavenly apparitions. There is good reason why devout Protestants feature so prominently among the early keepers of diaries, often unsparingly frank: under the eye of an all-seeing God it was useless to dissemble. When Sewall lost his wife in 1717, his humbling search for a suitable widow with whom to spend his declining years is fully and painfully recorded. It was in these last years of his life that the public printed media came to play a more important role in Sewall's access to news. This was not because the newspaper itself had improved; as we have seen, John Campbell took a remorselessly old-fashioned approach to the newsman's craft. Rather as Sewall cut back on his public responsibilities he was increasingly dependent on second-hand information. In his declining years he even relied on younger female relatives for news, as when ‘cousin Mrs Jane Green told me of Governor Burnet's commission being come, which I heard not of before; though ‘twas known of in the town the evening before’.22

  What Sewall's diary reveals most vividly, in the first decades of the eighteenth century, is the survival of an essentially hierarchical structure of news gathering and dissemination. The public prints were part of the culture of society, and local debates could be stoked by pamphlets published in the Boston print shop. But the most important news inevitably came first to the colony's leading citizens, who passed on to kin, workmates and other citizens such as they thought fit. News sufficiently momentous was announced publicly from the pulpits of Boston's eleven churches. But there was much with which Sewall and his colleagues thought it unnecessary to trouble their social inferiors. The best news still, in Georgian Boston, passed around the circles of trust. Even a society built on principles of the spiritual democracy of equality before God had imposed its own social filters on that most precious of commodities, information.

  Boston was not a typical place. It was only towards the end of Sewall's life (and not with his approval) that the city relaxed its very strict control of licensed premises. Business that in other places might have been conducted at home or in the tavern was often transacted in communal gatherings: the meeting house, around the courtroom, even at funerals. Boston, of course, was as prone as other places to the circulation of uncontrolled rumour, either of dramatic events in the interior or momentous happenings from Europe. On 22 September 1685 Sewall picked up a rather garbled story from ‘neighbour Fyfield’, a less eminent citizen who did not move in Sewall's normal circles, of the execution of the Duke of Monmouth (this had taken place in London on 15 July). Fyfield had it from the ‘crier of fish’, who had apparently picked up the news from a sea captain.23 Further diary entries in the following week record a corrected narrative from more reliable sources. Here, as often, rumour had moved more rapidly, though less accurately, than the normal channels of elite diffusion.

  Boston was a unique laboratory: a place where news was funnelled through more restricted filters than in more densely settled European lands. Here the newspaper played a secondary rol
e as the first source of news. Sewall was committed to print – he had supervised the Boston press for three years as a young man and he was a published author – and he collected the newspaper assiduously. But mostly he used his carefully bound copies as a source of reference: for names and dates or for the political texts, the speeches and proclamations that they reprinted in full.24 The Boston paper also provided some useful commercial reference material such as the dates of landing of incoming vessels; though the attempt to include commodity prices, an innovation of the second Boston paper the Gazette, was dropped at the behest of Boston merchants who did not want to lose their commercial edge over competitors in Connecticut and Rhode Island.25

  In some years Sewall prepared for his bound volumes an index of the principal events, and he also added marginal notes as appropriate. For all this, the local paper played a small part in Sewall's network of information: smaller, indeed, than the imported papers brought by incoming vessels from London and Amsterdam. Perhaps for those less well connected than Sewall it was different: Campbell's paper had a more important role bringing the news to subscribers in the smaller outlying settlements around Boston. The arrival of competing papers brought different perspectives, and a certain loosening of elite domination of news. But in places like Boston, word of mouth communication, closely bound to the credit and reputation of the teller, remained at the heart of news communication throughout the colonial period.

  The Amateur Newshound

  By the mid-eighteenth century the Dutch Republic had lost something of its early lustre. It no longer inspired fear for the ruthlessness of its command of international trade, or awe at its sudden rise to the first rank of European powers. But it was still a marvellously sophisticated and ingenious society; and it still possessed one of Europe's most highly developed news markets. Each of its largest cities was served by a regular paper, some now long established. The Oprechte Haerlemsche Courant was the direct descendant of the paper established in the mid seventeenth century. Between 1650 and 1750 its circulation had expanded tenfold, to about 4,300 subscriptions for its thrice-weekly issues; the Amsterdamsche Courant sold about 6,000.26 These were impressive figures for the publisher, though perhaps less so when one considers the size of the population and the lack of local competition. Each of the ten Dutch papers published in the mid-eighteenth century enjoyed a local monopoly, protected and regulated by the local authorities. Such competition as there was came from overlapping markets: half of the Haerlemsche Courant’s print run was sold through its Amsterdam distributor.

  The vibrancy of Dutch news culture emerged from a long and distinguished tradition of pamphlet production, significantly more uninhibited in its approach to public affairs in one of the most urbanised, literate and bourgeois of European societies. There was no better place to be a lover, an amateur, of news; and there was none more ardent than Jan de Boer.

  Jan de Boer was a clerk.27 He spent three days a week working in the office of a vintner, an occupation that left him plenty of time for other activities. He was clearly in relatively leisured circumstances. He paid decent levels of tax, and possessed a small house in Haarlem that he was able to let rent free to ‘destitute persons’. De Boer was also a Catholic, a member of a minority Church that attracted some disapproval but whose members were generally left to practise their religion in peace. But de Boer was very aware that they owed this protection to the local magistrate, and a section of the population wished them no good.

  De Boer's news diary is very unusual. Unlike the documents left by Wallington or Sewall it contained very little autobiographical material. De Boer seldom wrote about everyday activities: he devoted his energies entirely to chronicling the news. He began his diary at a moment of political crisis: the appointment of William IV as Stadtholder, and the tax riots of 1748 that allowed William to entrench his power. De Boer continued it for twelve years before laying aside his beautifully presented volume, for which he had prepared a highly decorated title-page. Although he applied all his professional skills to crafting his book it was not intended for wider circulation. As soon as it was concluded de Boer put it away in a locked cupboard with his other manuscripts. He got his wish: the news chronicle remains an unpublished manuscript to this day.28

  De Boer wrote up his chronicle most days. Apart from the news that came to him by word of mouth, he also included reports from written sources, many of which he pasted into the volume at the appropriate places. De Boer was a gifted news-gatherer; he had the instincts of a true reporter. On a day when two ringleaders of the thwarted tax riot were to be executed, de Boer made sure he arrived early at Dam Square, so he could study the exact disposition. He was convinced that the arrangements made to marshal the crowd, with narrow entry and exit points, would lead to trouble, and so it proved. The huge crowd proved unmanageable, shots were fired and in the rush to escape many were crushed to death. Even in this tragedy de Boer could congratulate himself on the quality of his reporting: ‘I know that there was no-one else who had observed the events as closely and deliberately as I and who had immediately made notes on it all.’29

  De Boer was also an avid reader of newspapers. He was a regular reader of the Amsterdamsche Courant, but the ’s Gravenhaegse Courant was cited in his diary almost as frequently. Because the two papers were published on alternate days (Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday locally, Monday, Wednesday and Friday in The Hague), readers with subscriptions to both could in effect purchase a daily paper. During times of particular excitement de Boer could also get hold of other papers: the Leidse Courant, and papers from Haarlem, Rotterdam and Groningen. Most could be purchased in one or other of the Amsterdam bookshops. De Boer also read and collected pamphlets. The Doelist riots led to a search for scapegoats for current economic ills, and a number of pamphlets openly questioned whether Catholics could be loyal Dutch citizens. De Boer was both a contributor to and an observer of this debate: his poem De Patria went through several editions, as he noted with considerable pride. Pamphlets were often purchased from street vendors, and sometimes offered to de Boer by friends who had obtained something known to be disapproved of by the magistrates. The generally law-abiding de Boer enjoyed the frisson that attended the trade in semi-clandestine, if not particularly dangerous, books.

  Because de Boer notes so carefully where he obtained his news, we are able to anatomise with some accuracy the news networks to which an engaged but not privileged citizen had access in eighteenth-century Amsterdam. The results are very revealing. In 1748, for instance, de Boer noted the source of 179 news stories that he wrote up in his chronicle. Of these, one-fifth were events he witnessed himself, and a further 40 per cent were stories that he had heard from third parties. Less than 40 per cent of his news came from the reading of printed matter. This was a particularly turbulent year in Amsterdam politics, but even in a year when most of the notable events occurred elsewhere, like the Lisbon earthquake in 1755, fewer than half of his reports emanated from printed sources.30 Even among the printed matter, newspapers were far from the predominant source of news. If we examine the pieces that de Boer inserted into his news chronicle, most came from other types of printed media: pamphlets, government publications, and a few engraved pictures. Despite its heritage as one of the first centres of the newspaper trade in the seventeenth century (at one point, remember, the city had nine competing papers), newspapers played a relatively modest role in the news world of eighteenth-century Amsterdam.

  Disgusted of Sneek

  Why, for even so devoted a follower of news as Jan de Boer, were newspapers still such an unsatisfactory source of news in the mid-eighteenth century? In the Dutch Republic the exuberant, innovative newspaper world inherited from the seventeenth century had actually become more restrictive. Each city allowed only one paper. In return for its monopoly the paper paid a considerable fee, and the editors were careful not to compromise their investment by publishing anything of which the magistrates might disapprove. The self-imposed restraints that governed the con
tents of newspapers were not blown away by the great late century revolutions. In both France and the Low Countries the nineteenth century witnessed a retreat to a familiar, more conservative pattern of reporting. In this respect the contentious political cultures of Britain and America were very much the exception. More typical is this editorial notice in the Leidsche Courant, the paper of the leading intellectual centre of the Dutch Republic, published in 1785:

  Since a newspaper is meant to publish news events, and print official documents, and is not designed to be a collection of contesting articles, we kindly request our contributors not to bother us with this kind of copy.31

  Dutch readers did wish to take part in political debate. But this was largely confined to pamphlets and a new class of political journals. The newspapers, privileged, cautious and profitable, remained inviolate. In the nineteenth century coverage of domestic news would expand, to become the core business of newspapers. But in the eighteenth century this had not been achieved.

  Dutch newspapers were resolute in their refusal to publicise local political controversies. A letter of the Frisian patriots in 1786 was published in every Dutch newspaper except Friesland's own newspaper, the Leeuwarder Courant. The paper, conscious of its vulnerability to local government disapproval and the removal of its lucrative privileges, contented itself instead with reprinting provincial ordinances: such as a ban on fruit baskets from the town of Sneek (apparently they were smaller than those used in the rest of Friesland, and customers could be given short measure).32