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The history of newspapers and the history of journalism: Two disciplines or one?Joad Raymond aa University of AberdeenPublished online: 02 Nov 2010.

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Media History, Vol. 5, No. 2, 1999 223

REVIEW ARTICLE

The History of Newspapers and the History ofJournalism: two disciplines or one?

JOAD RAYMOND, University of Aberdeen

Chapters in the History of British JournalismSeven-volume set, 1998London: Routledge/Thoemmes PressISBN 0 415 18478 9, £450

Includes:

FREDERICK KNIGHT HUNT, The Fourth Estate: contributions towards a history of newspa-pers and of the liberty of the press (2 vols., 1850)ALEXANDER ANDREWS, The History of British Journalism, from the Foundation of theNewspaper Press in England, to the Repeal of the Stamp Act in 1855, with Sketches ofPress Celebrities (2 vols., 1859)JOSEPH HATTON, Journalistic London. Being a Series of Sketches of Famous Pens andPapers of the Day (1882)HENRY RICHARD FOX BOURNE, English Newspapers: chapters in the history of journalism(2 vols., 1887)

This then ... is the Elysium we English have provided for our Heroes! TheRushworthian Elysium. Dreariest continent of shot-rubbish the eye ever saw.Confusion piled on confusion to your utmost horizon's edge: obscure, in luridtwilight as of the shadow of Death; trackless, without index, without finger-post, or mark of any human foregoer;—where your human footstep, if you arestill human, echoes bodeful through the gaunt solitude, peopled only bysomnambulant Pedants, Dilettants, and doleful creatures, by Phantasms, errors,inconceivabilities, by Nightmares, pasteboard Norroys, griffins, wiverns, andchimeras dire! There, all vanquished, overwhelmed under such waste lumber-mountains, the wreck and dead ashes of some six unbelieving generations,does the Age of Cromwell and his Puritans lie hidden from us. This is whatwe, for our share, have been able to accomplish towards keeping our HeroicOnes in memory. By way of sacred poet they have found voluminousDryasdust, and his Collections and Philosophical Histories. [1]

The words belong to Thomas Carlyle, though he fostered them on an anonymous'well-known Writer', perhaps because he was himself sifting through this ignominiousdust in search of sparks of genius. Writing in the early 1840s, he is describing thefulsome shelves of pamphlets and newsbooks in the British Museum. Print technology

1368-8804/99/020223-10 © 1999 Taylor & Francis Ltd

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has buried eloquence, idealism and heroism in piles of foxstained paper and ink; thePuritan spirit is suffocated in the dryasdust Historical Collections of John Rushworth;inspired preaching and prayer are drowned out by the cant and white noise of modernity.Listening to the words of giants, the modern world hears only delusion and delirium; thearchives have become the province only of unimaginative antiquarians. Among thesleepwalking pedants and pitiful dilettantes were, of course, the newspaper historians.

The modern researcher into the history of newspapers should feel some sympathy withCarlyle. The archives of the newspapers alone are vast—for the seventeenth centuryaround 150,000 pages of British news serials survive; the quantity increases exponen-tially in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. And the history of these pages cannotbe written from within: to these the historian must add financial records, evidence ofdistribution and reading patterns, information on printing practices, geographical con-straints and comparisons with other societies and continents, biographical evidence ofauthors, editors, printers and publishers, information on social trends, developments inother literary forms, the whole sphere of political life. The history of newspapers realizedto its fullest is the history of civilization. It cannot be satisfactorily performed in ascholarly fashion without considerable borrowing from and reliance on secondarysources: to add something to that history we must form part of a great pyramid ofdwarves, standing on each other's shoulders.

A sense of the importance of this history, and a desire to sketch it out in somemeasure, appears to have developed in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries.Writers recognized that the newspaper was a literary form with a history, and offeredaccounts of the emergence of the periodical press. From the very first they werehampered by a deception. During the 1740s, Philip Yorke, second Earl of Hardwickeforged five issues of a premature periodical newspaper, entitled The English Mercurieand purporting to be from 1588. He had some of them printed. They were bequeathedto the British Museum with the papers of Thomas Birch in 1766. There they lay untilthe 1790s, when the Scottish scholar George Chalmers visited the Museum whileconducting research for a biography of Thomas Ruddiman, a printer, antiquary, librarianand newspaperman. Inspired by these papers, and seeing that they suggested England'sprecedence over the rest of Europe in the development of periodical news, Chalmersoffered in his book, The Life of Thomas Ruddiman (1794), an account of the develop-ment of newspapers in Britain. In this narrative lie the seeds of the Victorian vision ofthe newspaper: Ruddiman traces the emergence of periodicity, geographical dispersal,and associates newspapers with public opinion, political liberty and national pride incultural achievements.

The dialectical movement of discovery continued when Thomas Watts, a librarian atthe British Museum, published A letter to Antonio Panizzi... on the reputed earliestprinted newspaper: the English Mercurie 1588 (1839). Watts proved with scholarlyacumen that The English Mercurie was a modern production. The spectre of thedeception and its exposure haunted newspaper historians for the remainder of thecentury; we catch fleeting glimpses of their anxieties in their diligent and conscientiousresearches. Thus scholarship encountered forgery, learned scepticism and fathered thefoundation of a discipline [2].

Victorian historians constructed a narrative of newspaper history that remains familiar.Their methods were impressively eclectic and their research amateur but extensive. Inthe middle of the century Frederick Knight Hunt asked why there was to date no historyof newspapers, and set about remedying this deficiency in The Fourth Estate (1850).There he offers a perspective on the British Museum quite different from Carlyle's:

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more than a thousand yards of shelving are there stored with volumes ofNewspapers.... These files of old Papers excite a strange feeling. Few thingsare sought with more eagerness, and few things are sooner cast aside asworthless, than a Newspaper; yet still fewer are more interesting than a file ofsuch old prints. Look into them, You see the aspects, and hear (as some onesays) the very hum of a past life. [3]

Hunt had no intention of reading them all; he would dip into them here and there (in facthe read a great deal) but not systematically search them for traces of the lost spirit ofa former, more heroic age. Moreover it was probably less the joys of the dusty archivethan recent socio-political change that drew his attention to the frisson of the quotidian.

Why did the Victorians attribute such importance to the periodical press? First, theexpansion in newspaper-reading over the preceding century was phenomenal. Secondly,the railway had introduced significant changes into the production methods of newspa-pers, both metropolitan and provincial. Moreover the railway had sparked a nationalobsession (there were several journals devoted to it), and itself gestured toward one ofthe key themes of newspaper history: the relationship between texts and technology.Thirdly, liberty of the Press and the effects of Stamp Duty had been implicated in 1830sdebates over Parliamentary Reform. These histories were written at a time whenparliament was repealing or weakening legislation restricting freedom of the Press,including licensing and libel laws and taxation. Fourthly, newspapers had become muchmore profitable. Fifthly, and perhaps related to this, newspaper proprietors and evenjournalists were achieving a new social respectability. Sixthly, a number of great andcelebrated literary figures of the century had openly and without embarrassmentsupplemented their incomes through newspaper contributions. The fact that Dickensedited a newspaper, and that Wordsworth and Coleridge had written for them, lent somecredibility to the literary integrity of more humdrum forms of journalism. Finally, therise of newspaper history owed something to the 'Spirit of the Age'. The sense ofpotential embedded in the power of speedy communications is captured in Alphonse deLamartine's exuberant claims:

Before this century shall have run out, Journalism will be the whole press—thewhole human thought. Since that prodigious multiplication art has given tospeech—to be multiplied a thousand-fold yet—mankind will write their bookday by day, hour by hour, page by page. Thought will spread abroad in theworld with the rapidity of light; instantly conceived, instantly written, instantlyunderstood, at the extremities of the earth, it will speed from pole to pole.Sudden, instant, burning with the fervour of soul which made it burst forth, itwill be the reign of the human word in all its plenitude—it will not have timeto ripen, to accumulate into the form of a book—the book will arrive too late.The only book possible from to-day is a Newspaper. [4]

Lamartine's apocalyptic vision of the death of the book and the unbinding of the worddescribes a world tipped into a modernity that we have yet to find, though it remainspromised, just around the corner.

In conjunction with Thoemmes Press, Routledge has reprinted four classic works as acollection (and, it might be hoped, a series) entitled 'Chapters in the History of BritishJournalism'. The chosen works are Frederick Knight Hunt's The Fourth Estate: contri-butions towards a history of newspapers and of the liberty of the press (2 vols., 1850);

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Alexander Andrews' s The History of British Journalism, from the Foundation of theNewspaper Press in England, to the Repeal of the Stamp Act in 1855, with Sketches ofPress Celebrities (2 vols., 1859); Joseph Hatton's Journalistic London. Being a Seriesof Sketches of Famous Pens and Papers of the Day (1882); and Henry Richard FoxBourne's English Newspapers: Chapters in the History of Journalism (2 vols., 1887).The facsimiles are cased in an attractive, green and durable stitched binding, evidentlyintended for libraries rather than individual scholars. They are, however, accounts thatgive pleasure to the general as well as the scholarly reader, not least because of theircharming confidence in the power of the Press and the values of democracy, and theverve with which they negotiate sometimes intractable material.

Hunt's Fourth Estate places a marked emphasis on ecclesiastical censorship and thelong succession of libel cases that punctuates newspaper history (to our as well as hispresent). His account of the progress from Mercurius Gallobelgicus and NathanielButter's corantos of the 1620s to The Times of the 1840s and the protests against StampDuty is in many respects the skeleton upon which more recent historians hang their lessgeneral studies. The polemical wars of Marchamont Nedham and Sir John Berkenheadare there; as are Sir Roger L'Estrange and Henry Care; the trials of John Twyn and JohnTutchin; the writings of Defoe, Addison, Bolingbroke, Swift, Johnson, Smollet, 'Junius',Leigh Hunt; Wilkes and Paine have a dais in the pantheon; the reporting of parliamentarydebates plays a central role in the emergence of a strong Press. Hunt had a good senseof material culture, and discusses the practicalities of putting the disparate and geo-graphically diffuse materials of a paper together, as well as the introduction of'logographic' printing and the steam-driven press. Notwithstanding his whiggish empha-sis on the close and positive relationship between the Press and representative democracy(for him, as for almost all his successors, newspapers reflect a 'popular voice'), Hunt wasconcerned at the possibility of tripping on the heels of time, and his account of thenineteenth-century newspaper is cautious. Yet his confident conclusion reflects his senseof a battle won:

The moral of the history of the press seems to be, that when any largeproportion of a people have been taught to read, and when upon this possessionof the tools of knowledge, there has grown up a habit of perusing the publicprints, the state is virtually powerless if it attempts to check the press. ... Theprevalence or scarcity of Newspapers in a country affords a sort of index to itssocial state. Where Journals are numerous, the people have power, intelligence,and wealth; where Journals are few, the many are in reality mere slaves. ... inproportion to the freedom of the press is the freedom and prosperity of thepeople. [5]

Alexander Andrews subsumes much of Hunt's account, frequently with a scholar'scharacteristic lack of generosity. He concedes, however, in a moment of candour, thaterrors will be perpetuated until more minute research is performed; his work, he admits,fleshes the story of 'the almost untravelled waste of newspaper history' with a greateraccumulation of facts [6]. Andrews pays significantly more attention than Hunt to thedevelopment of the periodical press in the English provinces and in Scotland and Ireland,and in the colonies, including America. He offers more detailed accounts of legislation.Like Hunt he presents circulation figures as direct evidence of the influence ofnewspapers; like Hunt he presents an affirmative relationship between newspapers anddemocracy (though he also expresses considerable distaste for the unseemly behaviourof the House of Commons). For Andrews (and others) the intimate connection supposed

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between newspapers and civilization is evident in the 'stunted and deformed press ofIreland' [7]. Perhaps the most significant methodological practice of both Hunt andAndrews is their confident use of literary evidence, especially plays and poetic satires onnews. This does not reflect naivety or an unsound grasp of the empirical unreliability ofliterary works. Both understood that for the earlier period the refractions performed byliterary texts offered impressions of matters upon which the archives were otherwisesilent, and Hunt in particular quotes extensively from literature in order to sketch theurgency of appetites for news, and the hostile attitudes with which such appetites weresometimes regarded. Andrews manifests a predilection for quoting the great and the goodon the subject of newspapers. Familiar sound-bites from Samuel Johnson, Jefferson andNapoleon testify to the power and virtue of the Press. This inclination to believe suchaugust testimony survives in popular accounts of the newspaper to this day; now we haveadded Marshall McLuhan and Winston Churchill to the canon [8]. Though manyconfusions have been cleared up, more recent accounts for the general reader hardlyimprove upon their Victorian predecessors, except in illustrations.

Fox Bourne's account of the newspaper creeps up to 800 pages, though much hadhappened that was pertinent in the immediately preceding decades. His history is lessanecdotal and more synthetic than those of his predecessors, who offer numerouscharacter sketches as a means of adding colour. Joseph Hatton's Journalistic London, theodd man out in this set, is a series of such vignettes, based on articles first serialized inHarper's Magazine. Where Hunt and Andrews assumed a dynamic association betweenpolitical arrangement and newspapers (as implied, of course, in Macaulay's coinage, 'theFourth Estate'), Fox Bourne tried to demonstrate it. Looking back in 1887 over thepreceding half-century of legislation, he suggested the ways in which the newspaper hadbeen a vehicle for irresponsibility as well as an instrument of social and moral reform.Perhaps his most significant argument is that the repeal of most restraints on the Press,and a dramatic reduction in taxation, had successfully resulted in editorial self-regu-lation, a prospect of which Andrews was decidedly sceptical [9]. Fox Bourne writes:

Sedition, blasphemy, scurrility, and immorality, if they have not been quitekept out of newspapers, have dwindled down and have lost all force now thatenlightened public opinion has substituted a new censorship for that of the oldbenighted tyranny. Such unwholesome journalism as once flourished in spite ofarbitrary laws and vicious restraints has been rendered insignificant by thefreedom that has enabled wholesome journalism to grow so plentifully asalmost to cover the field. [10]

The public's sense of propriety now restricted the excesses of the Press, in anAristotelian version of self-discipline coupled with the invisible hand of the market;today we place less trust in the public's taste, but rely instead on the threat of (re-)introducing legal controls to curb those who hope to profit through titillation or outrage.The newspaper had been struggling for its liberty since the days of the PuritanRevolution (Charles I, Charles II, James VII and II are universally marked as villains inthis story), and it had finally triumphed in the Age of Revolutions; the parallel withParliamentary Reform is, if implicit, an obvious undercurrent, perhaps intentionally so.Cromwell was a powerful metaphor in Victorian historiography [11].

There are other chapters in this history not reprinted in this edition. Routledge/Thoemmes have mooted a possible series on American journalism. Welcome compan-ions to the present green volumes would include: James Grant, The Newspaper Press:its origin—progress—and present position (3 vols., 1871); Cucheval Clarigny, Histoire

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de la presse en Angleterre et aux etats unis (1857); Thomas Watts, A letter to AntonioPanizzi ...on the reputed earliest printed newspaper: the English Mercurie 1588 (1839),though this was partly reproduced in Hunt's Fourth Estate; the anonymous ThePeriodical Press of Great Britain and Ireland: or an inquiry into the state of the publicjournals, chiefly as regards their moral and political influence (1824); perhaps thepertinent sections of George Chalmers' The Life of Thomas Ruddiman (1794); and froma later period J.G. Muddiman (writing as J.B. Williams), A History of English Journal-ism (1908), Muddiman, The King's Journalist 1659-1689: Studies in the Reign ofCharles II (1923), and possibly Matthias A. Shaaber, Some Forerunners of the Newspa-per in England, 1476-1622 (1929). Recognition of these works (their scholarly short-comings, their accessibility) might give renewed interest to a discipline and a body ofscholarship which is neglected by social and political historians and by departments ofmedia studies alike.

Of course there are ways in which these plucky works have dated. Even Fox Bournedismisses the provincial press as a poor reflection of London's [12]. Recent scholarshiphas demonstrated that far from being a by-product of the metropolis, country newspapersparticipated in local dynamics and were sensitive to the demands of local readers [13].

Notwithstanding the prevalence of the term 'British', scant attention was paid to thedevelopment of the Scottish or Irish, let alone the Welsh newspaper. This has improveda little, though there is still much work to be done [14]. The numerous amphibious Scotswho travelled to London to write for its Press are duly discussed, but only as honoraryLondoners. The anglocentrism of Victorian scholars is in one sense deliberate. It followsfrom remarks made by Dr Johnson: 'All foreigners remark that the knowledge of thecommon people of England is greater than that of any other vulgar. This superiority weundoubtedly owe to the rivulets of intelligence which are continually trickling among us,which every one may catch, and of which every one partakes' [15]. The English Pressmanifested an English sense of destiny; its historians believed it was uniquely free, evenas they presented the evidence to the contrary. Literacy remained less than universal;taxes and other economic constraints stayed in place; a succession of libel cases curbedresponsible voices as well as the capricious. And less than half the population had thevote anyway. Besides, it is not only under twentieth-century moguls that the Press canmanipulate the public as well as provide a platform for the expression of their opinions.As Roger L'Estrange wrote in 1663:

it is none of the worst ways of address to the genius and humour of thecommon people, whose affections are much more capable of being tuned andwrought upon by convenient hints and touches in the shape and air of apamphlet, than by the strongest reason and best notions imaginable under anyother and more sober form whatsoever. [16]

The Press threatened popular political analysis even as it fostered it.Comforting delusions about 'English' freedoms have been shed, and the way lies open

for new questions about the role of the Press in the construction of nationhood, and inthe creation of communities. Those who have addressed such grand themes have tended,however, to confine themselves to secondary sources, which will never answer themsatisfactorily [17]. We are still waiting for a study of the role of news publications inrelation to the 'British Problem'. If political relations between the three kingdoms/fournations were governed by a complex physics of proximity and difference, and if politicalidentities were structured by the interaction between local, national, and state politics,what role was played by the communication lines established and maintained by the

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periodical press? What place remains for the London press in the turmoil of themid-seventeenth century, no longer the 'English revolution (1642-1660)' but the 'CivilWars of Britain (1638-1651)'? An account of the production, distribution and consump-tion of news in the 'Atlantic Archipelago' might offer profound insights into perceptionsof national identity and the role of informational networks in the construction of politicalideologies [18].

In the later twentieth century newspaper history has tended to choose a narrow focus,and has illuminated the minute complexity of the interrelations between politics—defined as ideological struggle, institutional process, and patronage relations—and thePress [19]. This worms-eye view transforms the aerial perspective on the grandertransformations of the Press. Yet for all the unmasked hubris of the Victorians, themodern reader of the scholarly monograph might find himself or herself hankering fora return to the bigger picture, complete with a good story and illustrations. What woulda modern Fox Bourne look like, aided by all these important studies? There are thingsthat can only be explained by a good story.

There remains another, more fundamental form of fragmentation in histories ofnewspapers, one for which the amateurism of the Victorians made them paradoxicallyless guilty. Much of the most interesting work on newspapers in recent years has beenbibliographical. Perhaps the most impressive single achievement is Carolyn Nelson andMatthew Seccombe's British Newspapers and Periodicals, 1641-1700: a short titlecatalogue (New York: Modern Language Association, 1987), which has made it possiblenot only to locate copies of these often rare items, but also facilitates other approaches.It is now easier to take a cross-section over a given month or year, or to spot continuitiesbetween various serials with different titles, and identify discontinuities and forgeries.Meanwhile attentiveness to the linguistic and rhetorical components of journalism hasdeclined [20]. The connections between formal and stylistic transformations has been leftunexplored; questions about the relationship between technology, form and content havenot been asked as they have, for example, in the history of science. During 1740 theGentleman*s Magazine offered a series of articles, perhaps written by Johnson, on theRoman Acta Diurna [21]. These were presented as forerunners of the newspaper; theVictorians were rightly dismissive of the idea on formal grounds. But might these officialproclamations have a place in the pre-history of journalism? Here is an example:

4th of the Kalends of April. The Fasces with Licinius the Consul.—It thun-dered; an oak was struck with lightning on that part of Mount Palatine calledSunima Velia, early in the afternoon. A fray happened in a tavern at the lowerend of the Banker's street, in which the keeper of the Hog-in-Armour Tavernwas dangerously wounded. Tertinius, the jEdile, fined the butchers for sellingmeat which had not been inspected by the overseers of the markets. The fineis to be employed in building a chapel to the Temple of the Goddess Tellus.[22]

Journalism is partly an exercise in filtering the mass of news to leave what is interesting,entertaining or relevant [23]; the criteria which have been applied here seem remarkablymodern. Anthony Smith has written:

Journalism emerged historically with periodicity of publication. Only whenpostal service, printing capacity and supply of material were all sufficiently andconsistently developed to the point at which regular weekly, thrice weekly, ordaily appearance could be assured, did journalism come recognisably into

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existence. This was in the seventeenth century, when printing—but notjournalism—was an acknowledged occupation. The enlargement of scale madepossible by the changes in printing techniques and organisational rearrange-ments of the Jacobean period caused writers to think and think again about thenature of that 'truth' after which they now so copiously and conspicuouslystrove. [24]

In one respect Smith is perfectly right: 'journalism' in a strong sense assumes a degreeof self-consciousness and professional focus, an awareness of the target and the weaponsin hand. Yet journalism is also defined through a series of language practices, a set ofrhetorical and narrative conventions that have a longer history than Smith's formalisticperspective allows. In this history the Ada Diurna does have a place; though we shouldbe warned that it is possible that many of these early roman news serials are forgeries.Over-credulousness could once again lead us in the right direction.

With so many bibliographical resources in place—a remarkable advantage we holdover the Victorians—we are now positioned to spend more time looking at the wholecloth of the newspaper. This includes news, editorial and advertisements, all three ofwhich participate in the construction of a news periodical, from the seventeenth centuryto the present. All three figured not only in the economic survival of a paper, but in thepolitical discourse of individual papers, and the variety of experiences they offered theirreaders. The newspaper is an intestine, in which the grand and the quotidian—thepolitical commentary, the report of a disaster, the news of an election, of a lost cat, ofa musical performance, of a battle, an advertisement for an escaped criminal, for coffeeor cocoa, for a book—are all digested into elements which both resemble their originsand offer something new. Like a digestive tract, it absorbs and expels, and demands afrequent fresh supply. The process of this consumption and digestion gives the newspa-per its identity, and so it needs to be studied as a whole system, as well as a series ofintricate micro-processes. There are hidden dangers lurking in the placing of newspaperhistory under the headings 'communication studies' that strangely loaded sobriquet'media history', or even, God forbid, 'media studies', insofar as they tend to dislocatethe social from the literary, the contextual from the content, the medium from themessage.

We are well-placed to jolt these paradigms today. Perhaps this is because of theInternet, which pledges a Utopia of free and open communicative encounters, but whichmay well turn out to be another false herald, discovering new constrictions. Theexperience of the World Wide Web—and of e-mail—has introduced a substantialcommunity living in the global village to new relationships between word and image, tonew reading patterns, to accelerated, rough-and-ready conversations. As a forum itinvites a new kind of journalism, one which permits not only reading and responding inrelatively familiar patterns, but introduces new spheres into the same cluster ofexperiences—shopping, medical treatment, tactile encounters, real-time virtual collabora-tion, the truly 'writerly' text, assembled by the active reader, and so on. The Internetpromises a social transformation to equal that following the replacement of the scroll bythe codex, or the coming of the printed word; yet the forces of capital—the serviceproviders, the telephone companies—may break this covenant. And it may be that animage-doting rabble of users will impose imaginative boundaries anyway, and theInternet and e-mail will be used mainly for pornography, dating services, advertisement,shopping, banking, and administrative bureaucracy, in the usual clash between the forces

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of enlightenment and of interest. It is precisely for this reason that we can ask new andprofound questions about the history (or histories?) of newspapers and of journalism, andwhy it is so important that we ask such questions; because we may rediscover ourselvesin the past, just as it becomes history.

This threshold is in fact precisely akin to that which Lamartine faced:

Thought will spread abroad in the world with the rapidity of light; instantlyconceived, instantly written, instantly understood, at the extremities of theearth, it will speed from pole to pole.

Whether the word will finally be dematerialized is doubtful.

NOTES

[1] Thomas Carlyle, The Letters and Speeches of Oliver Cromwell With Elucidations, ed. S.C. Lomas withan introduction by C.H. Firth, 3 vols. (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1904), vol. 1, 3.

[2] I discuss this incident and its impact upon newspaper historiography in 'Introduction: Newspapers,Forgeries, and Histories', in Joad Raymond, ed., News, Newspapers and Society in Early Modern Britain(London: Frank Cass, 1999), 1-11; also published as a Special Issue of Prose Studies, 21 (1998).

[3] Frederick Knight Hunt, The Fourth Estate, 2 vols. (1850; London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1998),vol. 1, 91.

[4] Quoted Hunt, Fourth Estate, vol. 2, 1.[5] Hunt, Fourth Estate, vol. 2, 292.[6] Alexander Andrews, The History of British Journalism, from the Foundation of the Newspaper Press in

England, to the Repeal of the Stamp Act in 1855, with Sketches of Press Celebrities, 2 vols. (1859;London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press, 1998), vol. 1, 99, 52.

[7] Andrews, The History of British Journalism, vol. 2, 145; [Anon.], The Periodical Press of Great Britain(1824), 72-86.

[8] Jim Allee Hart, Views on the News: the developing editorial syndrome, 1500-1800 (Carbondale andEdwardsville, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 1970); Keith Williams, The English Newspaper: anillustrated history to 1900 (London: Spring wood Books, 1977); Geoffrey A. Cranfield, The Press &Society: from Caxton to Northcliffe (London: Longmans, 1978); Anthony Smith, The Newspaper: anInternational History (London: Thames and Hudson, 1979); Mitchell Stephens, A History of News: fromthe drum to the satellite (New York: Viking, 1988).

[9] Andrews, The History of British Journalism, vol. 2, 347.[10] Henry Richard Fox Bourne, English Newspapers: chapters in the history of journalism, 2 vols. (1887;

London: Routledge/Thoemmes Press 1998), vol. 2, 370.[11] J.S.A. Adamson, "Eminent Victorian, S.R. Gardiner and the Liberal hero". Historical Journal, 33 (1990),

641-657.[12] Fox Bourne, English Newspapers, vol. 1, 379.[13] Geoffrey 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 (Colum-bus: Ohio State University Press, OH, 1965); C.Y. Ferdinand, Benjamin Collins and the ProvincialNewspaper Trade in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Hannah Barker,Newspapers, Politics, and Public Opinion in Late Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford Univer-sity Press, 1999).

[14] Mary Elizabeth Craig, The Scottish Periodical Press, 1750-1789 (Edinburgh: Oliver and Boyd, 1931);Robert Munter, The History of the Irish Newspaper, 1685-1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge UniversityPress, 1967); Llyfrddiaeth cylchgronau Cymreig 1735-1850 [A Bibliography of Welsh Periodicals1735-1850] (Aberystwyth: Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru, 1993).

[15] Quoted by Fox Bourne, English Newspapers, vol. 1, 145.[16] Andrews, The History of British Journalism, vol. 1, 62.[17] Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: an inquiry into a category of

bourgeois society, trans. Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA:MIT Press, 1989); and Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: reflections on the origin and spreadof nationalism (1983; London: Verso, 1991).

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[18] See the sketches for a new British history in the essays, in Brendan Bradshaw and John Morrill, eds., TheBritish Problem, c. 1534-1707: state formation in the Atlantic archipelago (Basingstoke: Macmillan,1996); and Steven G. Ellis and Sarah Barber, eds., Conquest and Union: fashioning a British state,1485-1725 (London: Longman, 1995).

[19] For example, Robert R. Rea, The English Press in Politics 1760-1774 (Lincoln, NE: University ofNebraska Press, 1963); J.A. Downie, Robert Barley and the Press: propaganda and public opinion in theage of Swift and Defoe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Michael Harris, LondonNewspapers in the Age of Walpole: a study of the origins of the modern English press (Rutherford, NJand London: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1987); Christine Gerrard, The Patriot Opposition toWalpole: politics, poetry, and national myth, 1725-1742 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994); JoadRaymond, The Invention of the Newspaper: English newsbooks, 1641-1649 (Oxford: Oxford UniversityPress, 1996).

[20] Though see Nigel Smith's important Literature and Revolution in England, 1640-1660 (New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 1994).

[21] Hunt, The Fourth Estate, vol. 1, 289-92.[22] Quoted by Hunt, The Fourth Estate, vol. 1, 289-90.[23] See, for example, Johann Galtung and Mari Ruge, 'Structuring and Selecting News', in Stanley Cohen

and Jock Young, eds., The Manufacture of News: social problems, deviance, and the mass media(London: Constable, 1973), 62-72; Roger Fowler, Language in the News: discourse and ideology in thepress (London & New York: Routledge, 1991); Gaye Tuchman, Making News: a study in theconstruction of reality (New York: The Free Press, 1978); Stuart Hall, 'The Social Production of News',in Stuart Hall, Chas Critcher, Tony Jefferson, John Clarke and Brian Roberts, eds., Policing the Crisis:mugging, the state, and law and order (London: Macmillan, 1978).

[24] Anthony Smith, 'The Long Road to Objectivity and Back Again: the kinds of truth we get in journalism',in George Boyce, James Curran and Pauline Wingate, eds., Newspaper History: from the seventeenthcentury to the present day (London: Constable, 1978), 153-71, at 55.

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