Introduction

The Great Plague of London, which ran from 1665 to 1666, was the last major occurrence of the bubonic plague in England, and simultaneously one of the first to be reported in newspapers. News reports updated readers about outbreaks, provided weekly death tolls and carried announcements of public mitigations. The Intelligencer of 21 August 1665, for instance, printed a Crown Proclamation prohibiting the keeping of the Bartholomew and Stourbridge Fairs on public health grounds:

Whereby His Majesty out of His Princely and Christian Care to His loving Subjects; and that no good means of Providence may be neglected to stay the further spreading of the great infection of the Plague, doth find it necessary to prevent all occasions of publick concourse of His People for the present, till it shall please Almighty God to remove the said infection. (The Intelligencer Published for the Satisfaction and Information of the People, 21 August 1665, 2)

While this chapter is not strictly about pandemics, the similarly dramatic curtailments to civic life caused by the novel virus Covid-19 have given cause to reassess things that many of us have taken for granted, including access to the historical press. The first cases of Covid-19 were recorded in Wuhan, China, in December 2019. Despite local lockdowns, the virus spread internationally, and the World Health Organisation declared a global pandemic on 11 March 2020. Less than two weeks later, all the governments of the United Kingdom imposed a stay-at-home order banning public gatherings until further notice. All sectors were affected, with libraries and archives closing their doors from 26 March 2020. Organisations were forced to pivot to digital-first delivery of collections and services (Day 2020), with digitised collections providing some continuity of access for users.

This brought into sharp focus the extent to which digitisation has made historical artefacts accessible online; as Adam Smith (2020: 110) notes, there is a certain irony in the fact that eighteenth-century print culture enjoyed greater accessibility during the pandemic than modern, in-copyright publications. However, the shift to online-only access exacerbated huge inequalities in access to digitised collections and digital infrastructures (Terras et al. 2021: 11) and confirmed that ‘standardised and rigid’ large-scale digitisation practices (Prescott and Hughes 2018) were inadequate to support the whole range of user needs.