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

by Andrew Pettegree

  46. Suzanne Tucoo-Chala, Charles-Joseph Panckoucke et la libraire française (Paris: Éditions Marrimpouey jeune, 1977).

  47. David I. Kulstine, ‘The Ideas of Charles-Joseph Panckoucke’, French Historical Studies, 4 (1966), pp. 304–19.

  48. George B. Watts, ‘The Comte de Buffon and his Friend and Publisher Charles-Joseph Panckoucke’, Modern Language Quarterly, 18 (1957), pp. 313–22.

  49. Ibid., p. 314.

  50. See here the interesting analysis of the stock of a major scholarly publisher by Ian Maclean, ‘Murder, Debt and Retribution in the Italico-Franco-Spanish Book Trade’, in his Learning and the Market Place (Leiden: Brill, 2009), pp. 227–72.

  Chapter 14 In Business

  1. His story is told in Anne Goldger, Tulipmania: Money, Honor and Knowledge in the Dutch Golden Age (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2007), p. 168.

  2. Simon Schama, The Embarrassment of Riches (London: Collins, 1997), pp. 350–70. The popular perception of tulipmania also owes a great deal to the extraordinary success and longevity of Charles Mackay, Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, first published in London in 1841 but still extremely influential.

  3. Goldger, Tulipmania, pp. 202, 235.

  4. Ibid., p. 238.

  5. Above, Chapters 2 and 5.

  6. John J. McCusker and Cora Gravesteijn, The Beginnings of Commercial and Financial Journalism: The Commodity Price Currents, Exchange Rate Currents, and Money Currents of Early Modern Europe (Amsterdam: NEHA, 1991).

  7. Ibid., pp. 22–3.

  8. John J. McCusker, ‘The Role of Antwerp in the Emergence of Commercial and Financial Newspapers in Early Modern Europe’, in La ville et la transmission des valeurs culturelles au bas moyen âge et aux temps modernes (Brussels: Crédit communal, Collection histoire, 96, 1996), pp. 303–32.

  9. McCusker and Gravesteijn, Beginnings, pp. 44–5.

  10. Ibid., pp. 399–404.

  11. Ibid., pp. 291–300; Anne Murphy, The Origins of English Financial Markets: Investment and Speculation before the South Sea Bubble (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).

  12. McCusker and Gravesteijn, Beginnings, p. 313. By publishing on post-days, Castaing clearly had in mind a client base outside London, or abroad, as well as in the city.

  13. Murphy, Origins of English Financial Markets, p. 99; Blanche B. Elliott, A History of English Advertising (London: Batsford, 1962), pp. 313–44.

  14. Ibid., p. 91.

  15. Ibid., pp. 94–5.

  16. Julian Hoppit, A Land of Liberty? England 1689–1727 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 313–44.

  17. Murphy, Origins of English Financial Markets, p. 109.

  18. Grant Hannis, ‘Daniel Defoe's Pioneering Consumer Journalism in the Review’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 30 (2007), pp. 13–26, here p. 16.

  19. Murphy, Origins of English Financial Markets, pp. 107–8.

  20. Hannis, ‘Defoe's Pioneering Consumer Journalism’, p. 22.

  21. Murphy, Origins of English Financial Markets, pp. 114–36.

  22. Still the best study is John Carswell, The South Sea Bubble, 2nd edn (Stroud: Alan Sutton, 1993).

  23. Daily Courant for 1, 2, 3 and 24 June 1720, accessed in the Guildhall Library, London.

  24. See the Daily Courant, 8 June 1720.

  25. Quoted Hoppit, A Land of Liberty?, p. 335.

  26. Julian Hoppit, ‘The Myths of the South Sea Bubble’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 12 (2002), pp. 141–65.

  27. Carswell, South Sea Bubble, pp. 95–6

  28. See ibid., Chapters 13 and 14 (added as fresh material to the second edition).

  29. A point made about the earliest prophets of doom in the dot-com book of the 1990s. John Cassidy, dot.con (New York: HarperCollins, 2002).

  30. Daily Courant for 31 October and 7 November 1720 (2nd edn).

  31. Other pamphlets advertised included The South-Sea scheme examined (Daily Courant for 18 October), The case of contracts for South Sea Stock (9 November), and a sober pamphlet by the bishop of Carlisle: The honest and dishonest ways of getting wealth (12 December).

  32. Post Boy, issues of 18–20 October and 8–10 November 1720, accessed in the Guildhall Library, London. The whole pack is illustrated on the website of the Harvard Business School, from the pack in the Kress Collection of the Baker Library: http://www.library.hbs.edu/hc/ssb/recreationandarts/cards.html.

  33. Hoppit, A Land of Liberty?, p. 344.

  34. William B. Ewald, The Newsmen of Queen Anne (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1956), pp. 30–1.

  35. Folke Dahl, ‘Amsterdam, Earliest Newspaper Centre of Western Europe: New Contributions to the History of the First Dutch and French Corantos’, Het Boek, XXV (1939), III, pp. 161–98, here p. 179.

  36. Elliott, A History of English Advertising, pp. 22–9, discusses the very earliest examples, which date from the 1620s.

  37. Dahl, ‘Amsterdam, Earliest Newspaper Centre’, pp. 179–82.

  38. Maura Ratia and Carla Suhr, ‘Medical Pamphlets: Controversy and Advertising’, in Irma Taavitsainen and Paivi Pahta (eds), Medical Writings in Early Modern English (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 183.

  39. C. John Sommerville, The News Revolution in England: Cultural Dynamics of Daily Information (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), p. 70.

  40. Elliott, History of English Advertising, pp. 37–45.

  41. Michael Harris, ‘Timely Notices: The Uses of Advertising and its Relationship to News during the Late Seventeenth Century’, Prose Studies, 21 (1998), p. 152.

  42. R. B. Walker, ‘Advertising in London Newspapers, 1650–1750’, Business History, 15 (1973), pp. 114–15; Elliott, History of English Advertising, pp. 57–73.

  43. Elliott, History of English Advertising, pp. 30–6.

  44. Ibid., pp. 94–5.

  45. Sommerville, News Revolution, pp. 147–8; Lawrence Lewis, The Advertisements of the Spectator (London: Houghton Mifflin, 1909).

  46. R. M. Wiles, Freshest Advices: Early Provincial Newspapers in England (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1965), p. 101.

  47. Ibid., p. 142.

  48. Ibid., pp. 367–72.

  49. Walker, ‘Advertising’, pp. 112–30.

  50. The Spectator, no. 10, Monday 12 March 1711.

  51. Sommerville, News Revolution, p. 43.

  52. Where political influence was concerned, proprietors were prepared to make even more extravagant claims, as with an author warning against the Craftsman, a weekly journal critical of Walpole in 1732, that it was read by ‘no less than four hundred thousand … allowing no more than 40 readers to a paper’. Quoted Michael Harris, London Newspapers in the Age of Walpole: A Study of the Origins of the Modern English Press (London: Associated University Presses, 1987), p. 48.

  53. Harris, ‘Timely Notices’, p. 144.

  54. François Moureau (ed.), De bonne main. La communication manuscrite au XVIII siècle (Paris, Universitas, and Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1993).

  55. Lucyle Werkmeister, A Newspaper History of England, 1792–1793 (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1967), p. 19. The Times began printing news on its front page only in 1966.

  56. See Walker, ‘Advertising’, p. 119.

  57. For an example from colonial Virginia see below, Chapter 16.

  58. John Styles, ‘Print and Policing: Crime Advertising in Eighteenth-Century Provincial England’, in Douglas Hay and Francis Snyder (eds), Policing and Prosecution in Britain, 1750–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 55–111.

  59. From 11,000 in 1705 to under 2,500 in 1717. Walker, ‘Advertising’, pp. 116–17.

  Chapter 15 From Our Own Correspondent

  1. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/101740. J. Paul Hunter, Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth-Century English Fiction (New York: Norton, 1990), pp. 167–72.

  2. Weekly Journal or British Gazeteer, 12 September 1724. Quoted Michael Harris, ‘
Journalism as a Profession or Trade in the Eighteenth Century’, in Robin Myers and Michael Harris (eds), Author/Publisher Relations during the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Oxford: Oxford Polytechnic Press, 1983), p. 42.

  3. The case of the coffee-men of London and Westminster (London, 1729), p. 5.

  4. Flying Post or Weekly Medley, 21 December 1728; Harris, ‘Journalism’, p. 41.

  5. Paula McDowell, The Women of Grubstreet: Press, Politics and Gender in the London Literary Marketplace, 1678–1730 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 55–7, 101–2.

  6. Jeroen Salman, Pedlars and the Popular Press: Itinerant Distribution Networks in England and the Netherlands, 1600–1850 (Leiden: Brill, 2014).

  7. Below, Chapter 16.

  8. Salman, Pedlars and the Popular Press, Chapter 4.

  9. Hannah Barker, Newspapers, Politics and Public Opinion in Late Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 101; Robert L. Haig, The Gazetteer, 1735–1797: A Study in the Eighteenth-Century Newspaper (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1960), pp. 178–80.

  10. Peter Fraser, The Intelligence of the Secretaries of State and their Monopoly of Licensed News, 1660–1688 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1956), pp. 30–2.

  11. James Ralph, The case of authors by profession or trade stated (London, 1758), pp. 22, 61–7; Harris, ‘Journalism’, pp. 37–8.

  12. http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/101739.

  13. R. M. Wiles, Freshest Advices: Early Provincial Newspapers in England (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1965), p. 192.

  14. Ibid.

  15. Ibid., pp. 290–1.

  16. P. M. Handover, A History of the London Gazette, 1665–1965 (London: HMSO, 1965), p. 53.

  17. This and the following paragraph draw heavily on A. Aspinall, ‘The Social Status of Journalists at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century’, Review of English Studies, 21 (1945), pp. 216–32.

  18. J. A. Robuck in his pamphlet The London Review and the Periodical Press (London, 1835), quoted Aspinall, ‘Social Status of Journalists’, pp. 222–3.

  19. Lucyle Werkmeister, A Newspaper History of England, 1792–1793 (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1967), pp. 21, 35.

  20. Cobbett, The Political Register, 4 January 1817, referring to his Porcupine, which closed in 1801; Aspinall, ‘Social Status of Journalists’, p. 225.

  21. For examples taken from the reign of Queen Anne, see above, Chapter 11.

  22. Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 65–125, offers interesting reflections on the relationship between gentility and integrity.

  23. C. Moreau, Bibliographie des Mazarinades, 3 vols (Paris: Renouard, 1850–1), nos 1,809–2,294.

  24. Konstantin Dierks, In My Power: Letter Writing and Communications in Early America (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania, 2009), pp. 206–14.

  25. I. Atherton, ‘The Itch Grown a Disease: Manuscript Transmission of News in the Seventeenth Century’, Prose Studies, 21 (1998), pp. 39–65. Also available in Joad Raymond (ed.), News, Newspapers, and Society in Early Modern Britain (London: Frank Cass, 1999).

  26. Data collected in Roger Chartier, ‘The Practical Impact of Writing’, in A History of Private Life. III. Passions of the Renaissance, ed. R. Chartier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), pp. 112–15.

  27. Judith Rice Henderson, ‘Erasmian Ciceronians: Reformation Teachers of Letter-Writing’, Rhetorica, 10 (1992), pp. 273–302; eadem, ‘Humanism and the Humanities’, in Letter-Writing Manuals, pp. 141–9; De conscribendis epistolis, ed. Charles Fantazzi, Collected Works of Erasmus, vol. 25 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985).

  28. Linda C. Mitchell, ‘Letter-Writing Instruction Manuals in Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century England’, in Carol Poster and Linda C. Mitchell, Letter-Writing Manuals (Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2007), pp. 179–80.

  29. Roger Chartier, ‘Secrétaires for the People’, in Roger Chartier, Alain Boureau and Céline Dauphin, Correspondence: Models of Letter-Writing from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century (London: Polity Press, 1997), pp. 59–111.

  30. Alfred Morin, Catalogue descriptive de la bibliothèque bleue de Troyes (Geneva: Droz, 1974).

  31. Clare Brant, Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

  32. The Letters of Benjamin Franklin and Jane Mecom, ed. Carl van Doren (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1950), p. 81; David M. Henkin, The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-Century America (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006), p. 180, n. 10.

  33. Roger Chartier, ‘An Ordinary Kind of Writing’, in Correspondence, p. 17.

  34. Dierks, In My Power, pp. 25–32.

  35. Ibid.; Brant, Eighteenth-Century Letters, Chapter 4: ‘Writing as a Lover’.

  36. Brant, Eighteenth-Century Letters, p. 172.

  37. Wiles, Freshest Advices, p. 194.

  38. Ibid., pp. 194–5.

  39. This section draws heavily upon Paul Friedland, Seeing Justice Done: The Age of Spectacular Capital Punishment in France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

  40. Ibid., p. 156.

  41. Ibid., pp. 168–72, 231.

  42. V. A. C. Gatrell, The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People, 1770–1868 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).

  43. Above, Chapter 6.

  44. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (London: Allen Lane, 1977).

  45. Friedland, Seeing Justice Done, pp. 247–8.

  Chapter 16 Cry Freedom

  1. G. A. Cranfield, The Development of the Provincial Newspaper, 1700–1760 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962); Charles C. Clark, The Public Prints: The Newspaper in Anglo-American Culture, 1665–1740 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). For the French affiches (advertising journals) see Gilles Feyel, L'annonce et la nouvelle. La presse d'information en France sous l'ancien régime (1630–1788) (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 2000), pp. 929–1,274.

  2. Arthur H. Cash, John Wilkes: The Scandalous Father of Civil Liberties (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006); Peter D. G. Thomas, John Wilkes: A Friend to Liberty (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996).

  3. The Briton, published in thirty-eight issues between 29 May 1762 and 12 February 1763, was edited for Bute by the distinguished Scottish novelist Tobias Smollett. http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/25947.

  4. Quoted Cash, Wilkes, p. 79.

  5. Ibid., p. 85.

  6. The North Briton, 45, 23 April 1763. Quoted Bob Clarke, From Grub Street to Fleet Street: An Illustrated History of English Newspapers to 1899 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), p. 88.

  7. Cash, Wilkes, p. 119.

  8. Public Advertiser, 17 December 1769. Quoted Clarke, Grub Street, p. 90.

  9. Clarke, Grub Street, p. 92.

  10. Only in 1972 would Parliament formally abandon the prohibition of the reporting of its debates.

  11. Robert R. Rea, The English Press in Politics, 1760–1774 (Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press, 1963), p. 5; Stephen J. A. Ward, The Invention of Journalism Ethics (Montreal: McGill University Press, 2004), p. 155.

  12. The political beacon: or the life of Oliver Cromwell, impartially illustrated (London, 1770), p. 3, quoted Clare Brant, Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), p. 176.

  13. Clarke, Grub Street, p. 95.

  14. This story is beautifully told by Ian Kelly, Mr Foote's Other Leg: Comedy, Tragedy and Murder in Georgian London (Basingstoke: Picador, 2012).

  15. Hannah Barker, Newspapers, Politics and Public Opinion in Late Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998).

  16. A thoughtful survey is Clark, Public Prints.

  17. Ibid., p. 216.

  18. John B. Blake, ‘The Inoculation Controve
rsy in Boston: 1721–1722’, New England Quarterly, 25 (1952), pp. 489–506.

  19. Pennsylvania Gazette, no. 1,324, 9 May 1754. Consulted in the library of the Library Company of Philadelphia.

  20. The New York Gazette, the New York Mercury, the Boston Gazette and the Boston Newsletter.

  21. Above, Chapter 11.

  22. Arthur M. Schlesinger, Prelude to Independence: The Newspaper War on Britain, 1764–1776 (New York: Knopf, 1958).