Introduction

In an age before modern media evolved, how did the British press contribute to the circulation of information in the wider public arena? It is not easy to offer a definitive answer, in spite of the advances in scholarly understanding that have occurred in recent decades. Studies of particular value include work on London newspapers (Harris 1987), on provincial papers (Cranfield 1962; Wiles 1965), on the general history of the press (Sutherland 1986; Black 2001), on the Irish press world (Munter 1967; 1988), on the Edinburgh press (Couper 1908) and on the cultural role of print (Sommerville 1996). Important as these sources are, they tend to pay less attention to periodicals outside the daily or weekly organs. All round, the most informative approaches from the point of view of this discussion are Barker (2014) and Pettegree (2014): the former is very strong on the development of the press in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, while the latter has the special merit of setting the British experience in a broad European context.

An exhaustive survey of this phase would require looking at the Restoration, the early eighteenth century (including periodical writing, notably that of authors such as Defoe and Swift), and would go on to consider the experience of the literary community in the age of Junius and John Wilkes. Space precludes such an enquiry: the limits imposed on the coverage of this chapter are explained in the following section. We should keep in mind some relevant aspects of the social and cultural context, for example the development of coffee house culture, the slow but steady increase in literacy over time, and the spread of communications through improvements to roads and the postal system. A significant issue in the background is that of the threat of censorship or legal sanctions. This is an area that has been greatly illuminated by scholars such as Laurence Hanson (1936), J. A. Downie (1979) and Thomas Keymer (2019). A case study at the end of this chapter provides an outline of the career of the Jacobite printer and editor Nathaniel Mist, treating him not as a wholly representative case but as a symbolic instance of some perils that journalists faced throughout the period.