"Read All About It!": The Rise of the Public Press

In the early 18th century, the public press came to dominate English writing.  Pamphlets, newspapers, and periodicals fed the appetite for news and commentary of an ever-hungrier reading public.  Richard Steele and Joseph Addison were the great innovators of the periodical essay, a quintessentially English genre of writing.

Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Classic English Literature Subcast, a little tributary streaming into the great flow of our main show, where we bathe in some of the lesser known pools of English literature.

Speaking of swimming – sort of.  You ever hear the expression “a fish doesn’t know it’s wet”?  Meaning that it’s very easy for us to be unaware of our circumstances or environment because they’re so normal, they become invisible to us.  I think Marshall McLuhan said something like, “we don’t know who discovered water, but it probably wasn’t a fish.”

I think that’s the way we are with media – especially, for the purposes of today’s episode – news media or what is sometimes called “infotainment.”  We are absolutely saturated with news and commentary – not always of equal quality – but it is the water in which the modern human mind swims.  Newspapers, magazines, radio, television, 24 hour cable, streaming services, podcasts, social media, and short form video produce a tidal wave of current events information.

But, of course, it wasn’t always thus.  And I don’t mean just because of the advent of electronic media.  I mean that, for most of human history, people did not get news.  It probably didn’t exist (I mean, as a social and cultural product).  Perhaps, at your local tavern, you might hear some gossip about the village, or about a flood in some field or a fire at some farm.  Big news events – if we can even call them that – probably came to the people through ballads from travelling singers.  Historian Mary Beard notes that for most of the Roman Empire, most of the people had no idea who the emperor was at any given time.  I’m sure it was like that for a good portion of pre-modern England.

Of course, once the printing press gets fired up, we start seeing more topical publications – broadsides at first (so called because they were only printed on one side of a rather large sheet, suitable for posting).  Later, the pamphlet arrives – a multi-page unstitched booklet – whose format allows, obviously, for more detailed discussion than permitted by the broadside.

Which brings us up to our point in the history of English literature from the main podcast.  We’ve spent the last couple episodes talking about Daniel Defoe and how he adapted a journalistic style of writing to fiction, in works such as “Mrs. Veal” and Robinson Crusoe.  But perhaps my use of the word “adapted” could leave a misimpression.  It might be taken to imply that Defoe’s innovation was to pick up a journalistic style long established and apply it to storytelling.  The truth is, however, that Defoe was highly instrumental in the development of that journalistic style in the first place.  In fact, he was writing at exactly the time “infotainment” was being born.

The parents of the English news and commentary boom of the early 18th-century were the European periodical (which had been around since Shakespeare’s time) and the essay form pioneered by Michel de Montaigne.  These seem to have been stimulated by the trade with Amsterdam.  The English Civil Wars spurred innumerable publications shaping public opinion on both sides.  That paragon of liberty and crusader for human rights, Oliver Cromwell, established strict licenses to control the flow of information, as did Charlie the Deuce, to be fair.  But whenever those laws went moribund, new modes of writing erupted.  The weekly reports from the House of Commons started in 1680, then the first newspaper outside of London.  Daily newspapers arrive in 1702, with The Daily Courant, published by Samuel Buckley.  Periodicals such as Defoe’s “Review of the State of the British Nation” rise to prominence at about the same time.

Where this effusion of news and comment intersects with what might be more traditionally considered literature and literary writing, however, is with the periodical essay: a short nonfiction piece, in a generally accessible and relatable style, published regularly in a magazine or journal, typically focused on social issues, manners, and morality for a middle-class audience.  Now, this seems to be a particularly English contrivance.  Professor Jane H. Jack quotes from James Boswell’s 1777 “Hypochondriack” essays:

a periodical paper of instruction and entertainment is truly of British origin.  It first appeared in London; and from the great lustre with which it produced . . . we must be convinced that this mode of writing has intrinsic excellence, and that mankind are fully sensible of its value.

Jack herself notes that it is rare that we can so precisely date the invention of a new literary form: she picks (with Boswell’s blessing, one presumes) April, 1709, and the inventor: one Richard Steele.

Imagine an asterisk here: Steele was born in Dublin.  As an American of both English and Irish extraction, I feel duty bound to point out that this English mode seems to be of Irish origin.

Nonetheless, we shall accept Professor Jack's assertion for the nonce.  In 1709, Steele published the number of The Tatler.  He had had a rather checkered past as a soldier, poet, and propagandist (Whiggish, of course) and, at the time of Tatler’s launch, was editor of The London Gazette.  He put out the new periodical on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, to coincide with the London post.  But, unlike most of the prehistory of the form, Steele did not wish news to be The Tatler’s focus.  Rather, public edification and improvement was its brief, as I mentioned earlier.

Except no one likes to be preached at, admonished, scolded.  So Steele adapts a longstanding convention in political writing – the creation of the persona.  It’s like a pen name, but more.  It’s a mask, an entire fictional personality adopted by the writer.  The advantages of doing so in political commentary should be obvious.  In cultural commentary, the persona functions less as a defense.  It allows the reader to accept guidance in morality, manners, taste, and conduct without feeling chastised.  Because everybody knows the persona – with all its comic exaggerations – is a front. It's kind of an early site of parasocial relationships with fictional characters.  

For The Tatler, Steele’s put forward Isaac Bickerstaff, Esq. as the putative author (the character, actually, is borrowed from a satire by Jonathan Swift, but Steele develops Swift’s creation into a comical, self-satisfied, but affable old gentleman).   Bickerstaff begins his publication with an epitaph by Juvenal, the Roman satirist: “Whatever people do will furnish the variety of our little book.”  It is, of course, something of a mission statement, which he fleshes out thus:

Though the other papers which are published for the use of the good people of England have certainly very wholesome effects, and are laudable in their particular kinds, yet they do not seem to come up to the main design of such narrations, which, I humbly presume, should be principally intended for the use of politic persons, who are so public spirited as to neglect their own affairs to look into transactions of State. Now these gentlemen, for the most part, being men of strong zeal and weak intellects, it is both a charitable and necessary work to offer something, whereby such worthy and well-affected members of the commonwealth may be instructed, after their reading, what to think; which shall be the end and purpose of this my paper: wherein I shall from time to time report and consider all matters of what kind soever that shall occur to me, and publish such my advices and reflections every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday in the week for the convenience of the post.

In its first paragraph, Steele’s Tatler, in the voice of Bisckerstaff, marks its distinction from other mere newspapers while slighting politicians and news-junkies as shallow and somewhat stupid.  Bickerstaff then humble-brags his own charitable disposition and heroic action in publishing, on a regular and convenient schedule, his advice on how people ought to think.

Which is not to say his reflections will be entirely divorced from affairs in the wider world.  He has, as he says, “settled a correspondence in all parts of the known and knowing world,” and will report and reprint such dispatches from the following news bureaus:

All accounts of gallantry, pleasure, and entertainment, shall be under the article of White's Chocolate-house; poetry, under that of Will's Coffee-house; learning, under the title of Grecian; foreign and domestic news, you will have from St. James's Coffee-house; and what else I shall on any other subject offer, shall be dated from my own apartment.

Steele parodies the journalistic convention of the dateline, which indicates the time and place a story is filed.  The Tatler’s datelines are the various fashionable coffee-houses of London which, as Steele’s public would know, each specialized in particular kinds of gossip and worldly conversation.  Anything not from those places will come from him personally, in his own apartment.

Those items datelined “From my own apartment” became the most popular and often were the sole content of editions.  Bickerstaff calls them his “lucubrations” – a word which here means “late night meditations by candlelight.”  The periodical became so popular that coffee-houses reported a significant surge in revenue as readers flooded in to catch the conversations.

The Tatler’s mission statement also intends to address the concerns of women: “I have also resolved to have something which may be of entertainment to the fair sex, in honour of whom I have taken the title of this paper.”  Obviously, one should not expect cutting edge progressive gender politics from an 18th century magazine, but that line lowers the bar even more.  The term “the fair sex” does feel a bit condescending now, and invoking the stereotype of the female gossip in the title . . . .  

Then again, we are dealing with an ironic persona, which complicates any assessment of the values imparted by it.  A recurring character in the Tatler universe is one Jenny Distaff, Isaac’s half-sister.  In numbers 10 and 33, she stands in for him (as he is out of town) and offers her own essays.  In later editions, we learn from Bickerstaff that he has successfully married Jenny off – or disposed of her for life, as he says.  In Tatler 104, from December of 1709 – dateline his own apartment – Bickerstaff tells of a dinner he has with Jenny, in which he is very pleased at the success of his matchmaking.  

It’s clear throughout that Jenny wants to talk about her husband, but Isaac dodges the subject until she reprimands him for unkindness.  He has witnessed his revelation: 

I perceived she expected to be treated hereafter not as Jenny Distaff, but Mrs. Tranquillus. I was very well pleased with this change in her humor; and, upon talking with her on several subjects, I could not but fancy I saw a great deal of her husband’s way and manner in her remarks, her phrases, the tone of her voice, and the very air of her countenance. This gave me an unspeakable satisfaction, not only because I had found her a husband, from whom she could learn many things that were laudable, but also because I looked upon her imitation of him as an infallible sign that she entirely loved him. 

Ah, she is so much changed for the better!  Yet, still there lingers the vanity of her sex, alas!  She worries that she will not always appear beautiful to such a worthy husband, but her brother comforts her: “An inviolable fidelity, good humor, and complacency of temper outlive all the charms of a fine face, and make the decays of it invisible.”  It’s advice we still here bandied about, but maybe its hackneyed quality doesn’t necessarily indicate its obsolescence. But it does read as particularly gendered.

Another fellow integral to the success of The Tatler, and thereby of the entire genre of the periodical essay, is Joseph Addison, an old school friend of Steele’s.  Addison was a politician who had dabbled in the literary arts when he joined his friend, composing some 42 essays for the magazine.  When The Tatler folded in 1711, its Whiggish slant now inconvenient in Tory times, the men elected to launch a new magazine, less explicitly partisan, but more experimental.  

The new persona, Mr. Spectator, lent his name to the periodical.  Whereas Isaac Bickerstaff  embodies a certain sociability, a gregariousness (at least until the dispatches from his own apartment came to be the magazine itself), Mr. Spectator emphasizes his dissociation from the world – he merely observes and comments:

I live in the World, rather as a Spectator of Mankind, than as one of the Species; by which means I have made myself a Speculative Statesman, Soldier, Merchant, and Artizan, without ever meddling with any Practical Part in Life. I am very well versed in the Theory of an Husband, or a Father, and can discern the Errors in the Œconomy, Business, and Diversion of others, better than those who are engaged in them; as Standers-by discover Blots, which are apt to escape those who are in the Game. I never espoused any Party with Violence, and am resolved to observe an exact Neutrality between the Whigs and Tories, unless I shall be forc'd to declare myself by the Hostilities of either side. In short, I have acted in all the parts of my Life as a Looker-on, which is the Character I intend to preserve in this Paper.

Addison is the author of this first edition of The Spectator and the persona he creates really becomes an allegory for the magazine itself.  There is a sense in which Mr. Spectator only exists as a text (I know that’s literally true, but as a persona, he seems aware of the fact in its more figurative form: “since I have neither Time nor Inclination to communicate the Fulness of my Heart in Speech, I am resolved to do it in Writing; and to Print myself out, if possible, before I Die”).  I think that’s a really interesting posture.  I think it implies a few things.  One, that our selfness is determined by our mental processes, not by our physical bodies.  It seems to me that that's the dominant conception in most of modern society, that our bodies are just cars that our minds drive around.  We are creatures created by information.  It’s like an early version of that thought experiment: imagine that your brain could be bitmapped, and all your knowledge, beliefs, values, experiences, and memories could be turned to code.  Your body dies, but your code is uploaded to the cloud.  Do you still exist?  If you were downloaded to a drive somewhere, are you now the file?  Addison’s notion of “printing oneself out” seems really freaky. 

That also leads us to another of Mr. Spectator’s assertions.  In Spectator 10, Addison writes that this paper is intended for “every one that considers the World as a Theatre, and desires to form a right Judgment of those who are the Actors on it.”  So the readership are spectators: we watch Mr. Spectator watching others.  We are people who only watch and judge other people.  And doesn’t that sound exactly like our digital culture now?  Isn’t that a succinct and prescient description of a world in which social media is our only experience?  Endless scrolling, watching other people, then judging them with likes and shares.

Or what about this thought, from the same edition:

Is it not much better to be let into the Knowledge of ones-self, than to hear what passes in Muscovy or Poland; and to amuse our selves with such Writings as tend to the wearing out of Ignorance, Passion, and Prejudice, than such as naturally conduce to inflame Hatreds, and make Enmities irreconcileable?

Now, the immediate context of this passage is to distinguish The Spectator from other mere newsmagazines, those that lack the necessary moral edification, the “sound and wholesome sentiments as shall have a good effect on their conversation.”  But it certainly reminds me of the fragmented media landscape in which we live.  Algorithms designed to stoke anger and fear at some caricatured “other” – inflaming hatreds and making enmities irreconcilable.  One finds little edification on cable news and polemical podcasts.

Of course, the sound and wholesome sentiments propounded by Mr. Spectator are thoroughly bourgeois.  I’ve mentioned in other episodes that we are in a period in which society comes to be dominated – in terms of moral values and ethical outlook – less by the aristocracy and more by the middle class.  It seems clear that the commercial class formed the bulk of The Spectator’s readership.  It presents the idea of virtue as the habits of mind of the prudent city merchant, whose telos is prosperity: 

For these Reasons there are no more useful Members in a Commonwealth than Merchants. They knit Mankind together in a mutual Intercourse of good Offices, distribute the Gifts of Nature, find Work for the Poor, add Wealth to the Rich, and Magnificence to the Great. Our English Merchant converts the Tin of his own Country into Gold, and exchanges his Wool for Rubies. 

Returning to their promise to address the concerns of the female reader (in however successful a way you wish to judge its execution), Steele writes an exemplum in Spectator 11 that trammels up a ruthless belief in commerce with the necessity of compassion.  

He writes of a Arietta, a woman of wit and wisdom, who,offended by a story that exploits tropes of female infidelity and insatiability, recounts the story of Mr. Inkle, a young merchant, who falls in love with, seduces, and impregnates an indigenous woman named Yarico.  But, of course, love is not profitable: 

To be short, Mr. Thomas Inkle, now coming into English Territories, began seriously to reflect upon his loss of Time, and to weigh with himself how many Days Interest of his Mony he had lost during his Stay with Yarico. This Thought made the Young Man very pensive, and careful what Account he should be able to give his Friends of his Voyage. Upon which Considerations, the prudent and frugal young Man sold Yarico to a Barbadian Merchant; notwithstanding that the poor Girl, to incline him to commiserate her Condition, told him that she was with Child by him: But he only made use of that Information, to rise in his Demands upon the Purchaser.

The ironic tone here is just brutal – especially that last line about her pregnancy making her more valuable.  There’s a whole allegory for colonialism in this little tale.

Addison and Steele’s development of the periodical essay spawned a literary genre that would become almost synonymous with 18th century English letters.  In their wake came many other influential journals: The Craftsman, launched in 1726 in opposition to the policies of Sir Robert Walpole (basically the first prime minister), Eliza Haywood’s The Female Spectator, which offered a genuine female perspective rather than its namesake’s distant observations of female experience, and, perhaps most importantly, Dr. Johnson’s The Rambler, which returned an elevated prose style to British writing, as opposed to the more colloquial styles of Defoe, Steele, and Addison.  By the by, the Tatler and the Spectator are still in print today, though much mutated from their 18th century beginnings.  Today, Substack has amplified the old blogosphere which was itself something of a cyber-version of the periodical essay.

Anyway, I certainly wanted to let you all know about this development in the history of English literature, especially as it struck how so much of our concerns today about media echo chambers, information silos, alternative facts, and so on, while multiplied by the technology available to us, are not particularly endemic to us.  We also have media personae: Stephen Colbert seems very much in the tradition of an Isaac Bickerstaff or a Mr. Spectator.  Indeed, his is a parody of a particular kind of talking head, but I think most observers can see that even putatively earnest news commentators are playing to an audience, performing a role, inventing a character.  We accept the duplicity because they embody our rage and anxiety and play it back to us as strength.  Plus ca change.

Well, thanks for dropping in on the Classic English Literature Subcast.  I hope you found today’s chinwag both entertaining and edifying, like an oral periodical essay.  Hmm . . . I guess that’s really what monologue podcasts are – new versions.  Huh.  Anyway, please like, follow, and subscribe.  Drop a 5 star rating.  Tell your friends.  Send me money.  Woo-hoo!  Enjoy the next couple of weeks.  Talk to you then.