The Uniqueness of the Scottish Market: Law, Theology and Medicine

Uninterrupted runs of Scottish eighteenth-century newspapers are rare. Cheap, folio pages challenge most binders, and when finally bound in volumes, challenge most library shelves. Nevertheless, in 1776 the Caledonian Mercury urged its subscribers ‘to preserve their papers carefully, and bind them up’. This unusual advice was ‘particularly recommend[ed] … to Universities, and others who keep libraries of books’ (2 July 1776, 2). John Robertson, the publisher of the Caledonian Mercury, knew what he was doing in targeting the university market. Having purchased the Mercury four years earlier from the family of Thomas Ruddiman – publisher of Scotland's first medical periodical and Keeper of the Advocates’ Library (now the National Library of Scotland) – he was well aware that universities were the training ground for the professions, fundamentally shaping the Scottish market for news: theology, the law and medicine. These were the subjects driving the Enlightenment and enrolment at Scotland's universities, especially Edinburgh (Sher 1985: 27–31). The most complete collections of eighteenth-century Scottish newspapers now reside principally with the nation's academic and legal institutions.

The Advocates’ Library is perhaps the richest source of pre-1800 Scottish periodicals. The Signet Library, serving Edinburgh's other legal society, the Writers to the Signet, is not far behind. Advocates and solicitors were a ready market, especially for local and regional business news (Craig 1931: 81). The publisher of the Mercury understood this; after all, the relationship between Edinburgh's printers and the courts in Scotland had long been symbiotic: Scottish law required every court case to be printed in all its aspects, with copies of the proceedings circulated to the presiding justices, to the jurors and to all those involved in the prosecution and the defence (Finlay 2012: 51). Thus Petitions, Memorials and Answers – as the documents were known – account for the vast majority of all titles published in eighteenth-century Edinburgh, something the ESTC decisively demonstrates (Brown 2012: 14–18). The proceedings for the regular sittings or sessions of the High Court were bound and collected by the legal community, just as magazines were by subscribers. These Session Papers, as they came to be known, appeared in serial fashion at regular intervals and essentially comprise Scotland's first law journal.