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

by Andrew Pettegree

  29. Sutherland, Restoration Newspaper, p. 15.

  30. The classic survey is Bryant Lillywhite, London Coffee Houses: A Reference Book of the Coffee Houses of the Seventeenth, Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1963).

  31. Quoted Fraser, Intelligence, p. 119.

  32. Cowan, The Social Life of Coffee, pp. 196–8.

  33. Frank Staff, The Penny Post, 1680–1918 (London: Lutterworth, 1964), pp. 34–51; Thomas Todd, William Dockwra and the Rest of the Undertakers: The Story of the London Penny Post, 1680–2 (Edinburgh: Cousland, 1952); Duncan Campbell-Smith, Masters of the Post: The Authorised History of the Royal Mail (London: Allen Lane, 2011), pp. 59–61.

  34. Fraser, Intelligence; Marshall, Intelligence and Espionage, pp. 78–95.

  35. Sutherland, Restoration Newspaper, p. 18.

  36. Mark Goldie, ‘Roger L'Estrange's Observator and the Exorcism of the Plot’, in Dunan-Page and Lynch (eds), Roger L'Estrange, pp. 67–88.

  37. Mark Knights, Politics and Opinion in the Exclusion Crisis, 1678–1681 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 168. The overall levels of printing activity are charted in John Barnard and Maureen Bell, ‘Statistical Tables’, in Barnard and D. F. McKenzie (eds), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain. Volume IV, 1557–1695 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 779–84.

  38. Knights, Politics and Opinion, p. 169.

  39. Sutherland, Restoration Newspaper, p. 23.

  40. William B. Ewald, The Newsmen of Queen Anne (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1956), p. 7; Julian Hoppit, A Land of Liberty? England 1689–1727 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 178.

  41. G. A. Cranfield, The Development of the Provincial Newspaper, 1700–1760 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962); R. M. Wiles, Freshest Advices: Early Provincial Newspapers in England (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1965).

  42. Wiles, Freshest Advices, p. 192.

  43. Ibid.

  44. Daily Courant, 15 August 1704; Flying Post, 2 September 1704; Ewald, Newsmen of Queen Anne, pp. 34–5, 38–40.

  45. Sutherland, Restoration Newspaper, pp. 91–122.

  46. Daily Courant, 11 March 1702, quoted Wiles, Freshest Advices, p. 269.

  47. Hoppit, Land of Liberty?, p. 181; Geoffrey Holmes, The Trial of Doctor Sacheverell (London: Eyre Methuen, 1973); Mark Knights (ed.), Faction Displayed: Reconsidering the Trial of Dr Henry Sacheverell (London: Parliamentary Yearbook Trust, 2012).

  48. Wiles, Freshest Advices, pp. 46 ff.

  Chapter 12 The Search for Truth

  1. The true report of the burning of the steeple and church of Paul's in London (London: William Seres, 1561). Modern reprint in A. F. Pollard, Tudor Tracts, 1532–1588 (Westminster: Constable 1903), here p. 405. STC 19930. USTC 505897. There was also a French translation: Récit veritable du grand temple et clocher de la cité de Londres, en Angleterre, nommé saint Paul, ruïné et destruit par la foudre du tonnerre (Lyon: Jean Saugrain, 1561). USTC 37109.

  2. Pollard, Tudor Tracts, p. 406.

  3. Ibid., p. 407. The fire at St Paul's is also discussed in Alexandra Walsham, Providence in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 232–4.

  4. M. A. Overall, ‘The Exploitation of Francesco Spiera’, Sixteenth Century Journal, 26 (1995), pp. 619–37. Even in the 1690s, a completely different deathbed confession of a repentant atheist could draw on the enduring fame of Spiera. This so-called Second Spira sold 30,000 copies before it was exposed as a fake. J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New York: Norton, 1990), pp. 182–4.

  5. Nehemiah Wallington possessed a manuscript copy of the account of Spiera published by Nathaniel Bacon in 1638. David Booy, The Notebooks of Nehemiah Wallington, 1618–1654 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), pp. 154, 274–5. For Wallington, see also below, Chapter 16.

  6. Michel Chomarat and Jean-Paul Laroche, Bibliographie Nostradamus (Baden Baden: Koerner, 1989).

  7. Norman Jones, The Birth of the Elizabethan Age: England in the 1560s (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993), p. 40.

  8. B. S. Capp, Astrology and the Popular Press: English Almanacs, 1500–1800 (London: Faber and Faber, 1979).

  9. For Brant, see Chapter 3 above. Of the four hundred illustrated German broadsheets logged in the USTC database, over 130 deal with these heavenly apparitions. For other forms of illustrated news broadsheets see above, Chapter 4.

  10. Walter L. Strauss, The German Single-Leaf Woodcut, 1550–1600, 3 vols (New York: Abaris, 1975), pp. 163, 480, 648, 939 (comet of 1577), 399, 656 (multiple suns).

  11. Ibid., pp. 481, 949.

  12. Ibid., pp. 350, 396, 860.

  13. Andrew Cunningham and Ole Peter Grell, The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Religion, War, Famine and Death in Reformation Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 174.

  14. Nehemiah Wallington, Historical notices of events occurring chiefly in the reign of Charles I, ed. R. Webb (London: Bentley, 1869), pp. 150–1.

  15. Jennifer Spinks, Monstrous Births and Visual Culture in Sixteenth-Century Germany (London: Chatto & Pickering, 2009); Julie Crawford, Marvelous Protestantism: Monstrous Births in Post-Reformation England (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005).

  16. Spinks, Monstrous Births, pp. 59–79.

  17. The true description of two monstrous children born at Herne in Kent (London, 1565). STC 6774. Other broadsheets of the same period and genre are illustrated in Crawford, Marvelous Protestantism.

  18. David Cressy, Agnes Bowker's Cat: Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Jones, Birth of the Elizabethan Age, pp. 45–7.

  19. Andrew Hadfield, ‘News of the Sussex Dragon’, Reformation, 17 (2012), pp. 99–113.

  20. Above, Chapter 10.

  21. Leo Noordegraaf and Gerrit Valk, De Gave Gods: De pest in Holland vanaf de late Middeleeuwen, 2nd edn (Amsterdam: Bakker, 1996); Cunningham and Grell, Four Horsemen, Chapter 5.

  22. Claire Tomalin, Samuel Pepys (London: Viking, 2002), pp. 227–35.

  23. Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

  24. Above, Chapter 1. The concept of honour in news is developed particularly in David Randall, Credibility in Elizabethan and Early Stuart Military News (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2008). C.f. Shapin, Social History of Truth, pp. 65–125.

  25. James Shirley, Love Tricks or the School of Complement, quoted Jayne E. E. Boys, London's News Press and the Thirty Years War (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2011), p. 170.

  26. Quoted Stephen J. A. Ward, The Invention of Journalism Ethics (Montreal: McGill University Press, 2004), p. 119.

  27. 20 October 1631, STC 18507.227; quoted Boys, London News Press, p. 175.

  28. Quoted Boys, London News Press, p. 171.

  29. Ibid., p. 170.

  30. Ben Jonson, A Staple of News, Act I, scene 4, lines 10–11. A groat was worth four pence.

  31. See here the elegant and insightful remarks of Massimo Petta, ‘Wild Nature and Religious Readings of Events: Natural Disaster in Milanese Printed Reports (16th–17th Century)’, in Bo-Jan Borstner et al. (eds), Historicizing Religion: Critical Approaches to Contemporary Concerns (Pisa: PLUS-Pisa University Press, 2010), pp. 199–231.

  32. Ahasver Fritsch, Discursus de Novellarum, quas vocant Neue Zeitungen, hodierno usu et abusu (1676); Otto Groth, Die Geschichte der Deutschen Zeitungswissenschaft (Munich: Weinmayer, 1948), p. 15. Extracts from the various participants in the German newspaper debate are collected in Elger Blühm and Rolf Engelsing (eds), Die Zeitung. Deutsche Urteile und Dokumente von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart (Bremen: Schünemann, 1967).

  33. Johann Ludwig Hartman, Unzeitige Neue Zeitungs-sucht (Rotenburg: Lipß, 1679).

  34. Daniel Hartnack, Erachten von Einrichtung der Alten Teutsch und Neuen Europäischen Historien (Hamburg: Zelle, 1688).

&n
bsp; 35. Kaspar Stieler, Zeitungs Lust und Nutz (Hamburg: Schiller, 1695), quoted Groth, Geschichte, p. 19.

  36. This follows the excellent discussion of Stieler in Jeremy Popkin, ‘New Perspectives on the Early Modern European Press’, in Joop W. Koopmans, News and Politics in Early Modern Europe (1500–1800) (Louvain: Peeters, 2005), pp. 127, here p. 10.

  37. The consequences of an active political culture (and a vigorous press) are explored with great insight in Mark Knights, Representation and Misrepresentation in Later Stuart Britain: Partisanship and Political Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).

  38. William B. Ewald, The Newsmen of Queen Anne (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1956), pp. 14–15.

  39. Tatler, no. 178, quoted Ewald, Newsmen, p. 15.

  40. The Spectator, no. 452, quoted Ewald, Newsmen, p. 15.

  41. Johannes Weber, ‘Strassburg 1605: The Origins of the Newspaper in Europe’, German History, 24 (2006), p. 393.

  42. Daily Courant, 11 March 1702, quoted Ewald, Newsmen, p. 14.

  43. Brendan Dooley, The Social History of Skepticism: Experience and Doubt in Early Modern Culture (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), p. 129.

  44. Stieler, Zeitungs Lust und Nutz, quoted Popkin, ‘New Perspectives’, p. 11.

  45. Ward, The Invention of Journalism Ethics, p. 124.

  46. Below, Chapter 16.

  47. C. John Sommerville, The News Revolution in England: Cultural Dynamics of Daily Information (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 132–3.

  Chapter 13 The Age of the Journal

  1. John Brewer and Roy Porter, Consumption and the World of Goods (London: Routledge, 1993).

  2. David A. Kronick, A History of Scientific and Technical Periodicals (Methuen, NJ: Scarecrow, 1976).

  3. Margery Purver, The Royal Society: Concept and Creation (Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press, 1967); Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994).

  4. David A. Kronick, ‘Notes on the Printing History of the Early Philosophical Transactions’, in his ’Devant le deluge’ and Other Essays on Early Modern Scientific Communication (Oxford: Scarecrow, 2004), pp. 153–79, here p. 164.

  5. Below, Chapter 18.

  6. Jack R. Censer, The French Press in the Age of Enlightenment (London: Routledge, 1994).

  7. James Sutherland, The Restoration Newspaper and its Development (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), Chapter 3: ‘Country News’.

  8. Gilbert D. McEwen, The Oracle of the Coffee House: John Dunton's Athenian Mercury (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1972); Helen Berry, Gender, Society and Print Culture in Late Stuart England: The Cultural World of the ‘Athenian Mercury‘ (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003); C. John Sommerville, The News Revolution in England: Cultural Dynamics of Daily Information (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), pp. 103–9.

  9. McEwen, Oracle, pp. 113–40.

  10. From the Athenian Mercury of respectively 9 June, 18 April and 14 April 1691; Sommerville, News Revolution, pp. 106–7.

  11. Robert J. Allen, The Clubs of Augustan London (Hamden, CT: Archon, 1967), pp. 189–229.

  12. Monique Vincent, Mercure galant. Extraordinaire affaires du temps. Table analytique (Paris: Champion, 1998); Jean Sgard, ‘La multiplication des périodiques’, in Histoire de l'édition française. II: Le livre triomphant, 1660–1830 (Paris: Promodis, 1984), pp. 198–205.

  13. Richmond P. Bond, Tatler: The Making of a Literary Journal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972). For this and what follows, Alvin Sullivan (ed.), British Literary Magazines: The Augustan Age and the Age of Johnson, 1698–1788 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1983), provides excellent profiles and bibliography.

  14. Charles A. Knight, A Political Biography of Richard Steele (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009).

  15. On advertising see also below, Chapter 14.

  16. Erin Mackie (ed.), The Commerce of Everyday Life: Selections from the Tatler and the Spectator (Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1998).

  17. Tatler, 6 April 1710; Mackie, Commerce of Everyday Life, pp. 58–9.

  18. Sullivan, British Literary Magazines, pp. 113–19; J. A. Downie, Jonathan Swift, Political Writer (London: Routledge, 1985).

  19. C. Lennart Carlson, The First Magazine: A History of the Gentleman's Magazine (Providence, RI: Brown, 1938); Sullivan, British Literary Magazines, pp. 136–40.

  20. P. J. Buijnsters, Spectoriale geschriften (Utrecht: HES, 1991); idem, ‘Bibliographie des périodiques rédigés selon le modèle des Spectateurs’, in Marianne Couperus (ed.), L'étude des périodiques anciens. Colloque d'Utrecht (Paris: Nizet, 1972), pp. 111–20; Dorothée Sturkenboom, Spectators van de hartstocht: sekte en emotionele cultuur in de achttiende eeuw (Hilversum: Verloren, 1998).

  21. Sgard, ‘Multiplication des périodiques’, p. 204.

  22. Quoted Jeremy D. Popkin, ‘The Business of Political Enlightenment in France, 1770–1800’, in John Brewer and Roy Porter (eds), Consumption and the World of Goods (London: Routledge, 1993), p. 413.

  23. Sgard, ‘Multiplication des périodiques’, p. 200.

  24. Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Bestsellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York: Norton, 1995).

  25. Berry, Gender, Society and Print Culture; Bertha-Monica Stearns, ‘The First English Periodical for Women’, Modern Philology, 28 (1930–1), pp. 45–59; Sommerville, News Revolution, p. 105.

  26. Kathryn Shevelow, Women and Print Culture: The Construction of Femininity in the Early Periodical (London: Routledge, 1989).

  27. Ibid., p. 149.

  28. Olwen Hufton, The Prospect before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe, 1500–1800 (London: HarperCollins, 1995), p. 455.

  29. Censer, French Press in the Age of Enlightenment, pp. 88, 99.

  30. Susan Broomhall, Women and the Print Trade in Sixteenth-Century France (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2002); Jef Tombeur, Femmes & metiers du livre (Soignies: Talus d'approche, 2004); Maureen Bell, ‘Women in the English Book Trade, 1557–1700’, Leipziger Jahrbuch, 6 (1996); Helen Smith, ’Grossly Material Things’: Women and Book Production in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

  31. Wolfgang Behringer, Thurn und Taxis. Die Geschichte ihrer Post und ihrer Unternehmen (Munich: Piper, 1990), pp. 87–90; Nadine Akkerman, ‘The Postmistress, the Diplomat and a Black Chamber?: Alexandrine of Taxis, Sir Balthazar Gerbier and the Power of Postal Control’, in Robyn Adams and Rosanna Cox (eds), Diplomacy and Early Modern Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2011), pp. 172–88.

  32. For Meyer, see above, Chapter 9.

  33. Below, Chapter 15.

  34. Eliza Haywood, The Female Spectator, ed. Gabrielle M. Firmager (Melksham: Bristol Classical Press, 1993); Sullivan, British Literary Magazines, pp. 120–3; see also Alison Adburgham, Women in Print: Writing Women and Women's Magazines from the Restoration to the Accession of Victoria (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1972); J. Hodges, ‘The Female Spectator’, in Richmond P. Bond (ed.), Studies in the Early English Periodical (Westwood, CT: Greenwood Press, 1957), pp. 151–82.

  35. Firmager, Female Spectator, p. 10, for the French edition. Finny Bottinga, ‘Eliza Haywood's Female Spectator and its Dutch Translation De Engelsche Spectatrice’, in Suzan van Dijk et al. (eds), ’I have heard of you’: Foreign Women's Writing Crossing the Dutch Border (Hilversum: Verloren, 2004), pp. 217–24.

  36. Female Spectator, November 1744; Firmager, Female Spectator, p. 98.

  37. Ian Atherton, ‘The Itch Grown a Disease: Manuscript Transmission of News in the Seventeenth Century’, Prose Studies, 21 (1998), pp. 39–65, here p. 49.

  38. D. Osborne, Letters to Sir William Temple, ed. K. Parker (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), p. 116.

  39. Jacqueline Eales, Puritans and Roundheads: The Harleys of Brampton Bryan and the Outbreak of the English Civil War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), pp. 92–5.

  40. Bertha-Monica Stearns, ‘Early Engli
sh Periodicals for Ladies (1700–1760)’, Proceedings of the Modern Languages Association, 48 (1933), pp. 38–60.

  41. Ibid., p. 57.

  42. Jeremy D. Popkin, ‘Political Communication in the German Enlightenment: Gottlob Benedikt von Shirach's Politische Journal’, Eighteenth-Century Life, 20, no. 1 (February 1996), pp. 24–41.

  43. Ibid., p. 28.

  44. Popkin, ‘The Business of Political Enlightenment’, pp. 414 ff.

  45. Ibid., p. 420.