For Emily and Ambrose
Published by
Reaktion Books Ltd
Unit 32, Waterside
4448 Wharf Road
London N1 7UX, UK
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published 2021
Copyright Matthew J. Shaw 2021
All rights reserved
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers
Page references in the Photo Acknowledgements and
Index match the printed edition of this book.
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
TJ Books Ltd, Padstow, Cornwall
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
eISBN 9781789144185
Preface
T his is a book about the making and printing of news. As such, it is a history of ink, paper, printing press and type, and of the men and women who made and read newspapers in Britain, continental Europe and America from the time of the English Civil Wars to the Battle of Gettysburg in the United States over two hundred years later. But it is also an account of what news was, how the idea of news became central to public life and, at the same time, how newspapers were much more than simple carriers of information: they helped to define communities and offered entertainment, advice, untruths, advertisements and obituaries. At times for example, in ancien rgime France newspapers were seen as a threat to the very existence of the state; for similar reasons they were seen as a vital part of civil society, a pillar in the construction of the new American republic whose undermining might bring the entire edifice to the floor. Newspapers also ranged from purveyors of high seriousness to carriers of scurrilous gossip. They attracted the ire of moralists or were charged with being ponderous and tedious publications, full of pomposity and having the magic ability to send grown men to sleep in their clubs. Given their variety, there are good reasons for treating the various forms of newspaper publications throughout these two centuries less as a clear progression of a format than a sometimes contradictory and independent set of developments. But in the face of such thickets of confusion some sort of path needs to be cut, and a historical approach will not only help to show how newspapers came to be, but how they differed in responses to local needs or characteristics.
As well as taking a historical and critical approach, this book puts forward a number of hypotheses. One is that the making of news is a very geographical business. Centre, periphery; colony, metropole all these aspects of society profoundly affected the way newspapers developed and were distributed, made and read, and also what the meaning of news was. Local or national papers now have a very distinct set of meanings, but it is one that changed over time, and was worked out in different, if comparable, ways across Europe and America. It views the press as an international innovation, with copy, personnel and ideas moving across the seas and borders with regularity. The period covered from the English Civil Wars to the American Civil War is broad, but limits the focus of this book to the period of the hand press rather than the industrial age of paper production, although technical innovations such as stereotyping and the telegraph were in place by the mid-nineteenth century. Such an account is by necessity an aerial view, rather than a close examination of the ground. However, rather like a newspaper, the narrative attempts to liven the journey with human interest stories and occasional editorializing or opinion pieces. In attempting to tell a macro-level story, it focuses at each stage on a micro history, in which a smaller level of analysis aims to reveal something of the larger picture. And, of course, much is left out, as is inevitable for such a huge topic.
Another notion that informs this book relates to the idea of news and the role of reading. People gather their information from all kinds of places: today it may be from the television, Facebook, Twitter or even conversations around the proverbial water-cooler. For past generations, though, it may instead have been the sermon, the song or the play. These formats, places and modes of communication share common features, and newspapers relate, compete and feed off all these other modes of information transmission. It would be a mistake to carve off newspapers into their own separate space, not least because newspapers dealt with so much more than news.
Any account of information, news or reading is also an account of difference, privilege and exclusion. We may today, drawing on the ideology of the American Revolution and the crusading press of the nineteenth century, see newspapers as an important means of democratizing information. But news also had its cost. Literacy was often exclusionary. Newspapers as a genre played with the idea of those in the know and those outside the inner circle. At times of revolution, war or revolt, information really was power, and its control a vital aspect of governance. Our current obsession with fake news, the worrying revelations or hints about how money, power and technology shapes and controls the press and flows of what is believed to be genuine information, has dark early-modern echoes. We are also entering a time when the notion of what the news is is being dramatically reshaped by protean forms of media and a politics taking its cues from reality television, social media and old-school propaganda. It seems apposite to revisit how news and reporting, and the role it played in civic society, came into being, for good or ill.
Finally, and perhaps as a counterweight to news tendency to reduce everything to a story or an angle, this account is about real people and things: inky hands; the trundle of the newspaper barrow; the rustle, cost and afterlife of paper, from the chamber pot to the ubiquitous fish counter. News has its material history: newspapers are nothing if not texts about, made in and consumed with the world. And, we should remember, journalists and their readers are people, too: with noble aims as well, although, as the English eighteenth-century writer Dr Johnson noted, sometimes seeming to be without a Wish for Truth, or Thought of Decency.
An Englishmans Delight; or, News of All Sorts, 1780, satirical print. The consumption of news is associated with English metropolitan identity.
Introduction
L ike most books, this one was written over a number of years. Before my research and writing began in earnest, the idea of a newspaper was a fairly fixed thing in my mind: inky collections of text in columns on large, crunchy pieces of paper that appeared, thanks to an invisible army of scribblers, printers and deliverymen, both in letterboxes and on newsagents shelves every morning. Some-one from a century before would have been familiar with the whole process. I was aware, of course, of some changes to the industry hints that things may not be as stable as they appeared. As a teenager in the rural southwest of England, I worked, like many, as a part-time paperboy for one of the new free newspapers that proliferated in the 1980s, bringing news of the latest deal on new tyres at a local garage or a litter of kittens for sale in the ten-pence-per-word classified advertisements. I then graduated to a proper daily paper round, taking care to avoid impressment to the smaller crew of Sunday boys and girls, as on that day newspapers turned into large and heavy compendia of supplements, enough to bring on youthful sciatica. Then, in March 1986, the launch of Eddy Shahs
