Reading All About It: Eighteenth-Century News Culture

In the wake of the Leveson enquiry into press standards and Lord Justice Leveson’s subsequent recommendations for press regulation, the British press has been able to dwell once again on one of its favourite subjects: its own importance in national society and politics. As newspapers face the consequences of the seventh government-commissioned inquiry in seventy years, they have reminded readers repeatedly that press freedom has been an unalienable British right since the lapse of the Licensing Act in 1695. But why did Britain become a nation of news-lovers and what did they gain from the newspaper press? For historians of the infant press, which spread rapidly across Britain and America over the eighteenth century, reaching behind the pages of the papers has proved challenging. What readers wanted from the press, what they took from it, and how the press shaped their understanding of the world, have proved almost impossible to determine.

Readers are elusive historical agents. Of all the actors in Robert Darnton’s ‘communications circuit’, which models the influences on the lifecycle of a text – author, publisher, printer, shipper, bookseller, reader, back to author and so on – the reader has remained the hardest to locate.¹ This is in part a problem with sources: whereas those involved in book production have left at least some documentary evidence of their activities, readers have left few notes on what they thought or how a text shaped their understanding of the world. There is evidence as to who received particular texts, but what a reader actually read or heard (instead of borrowed, picked up, or was present in the same room but not listening to) and how he or she then interpreted it are two separate processes.² Consuming does not constitute internalizing, whilst internalizing is simultaneously individual and collective.³ However, even when readers have left traces of their thinking, questions arise as to historical contingency, the universality of reading experience across genres of print, and the individual’s experience as representative.

Newspaper readers present even greater challenges. There exists an overabundance of newspapers and a handful of business records, but few sources survive on their consumption. Newspaper contents offer clues to broad readership trends and a handful of subscription lists provide the names of those who probably received or read individual titles.⁴ Individual diarists rarely reflect in any detail on the impact that reading the news had on their lives, while the individual nature of responses raises the question how applicable their experiences were to hundreds or thousands of newspaper readers. Dependence on the newspapers as sources has encouraged and reinforced a focus on the impact of the fledgling Fourth Estate on politics. Inspired by Habermas’s theory of the bourgeois public sphere, historians in the 1990s sought to recover the press’s role in the formation of ‘public opinion’, an amorphous term used by the newspapers themselves, which enabled historians to discuss readers as a collective force.⁵ Since the 1990s, however, studies on the eighteenth-century press have stalled.

The cultural turn has reinvigorated the search for the meaning of news within the lives of its consumers. Harnessing this since 2000, historians of the nineteenth and twentieth-century press have reassessed newspapers as cultural agents, proposing that the meanings societies attributed to the press tell us much about the way in which power was operated within those societies.⁶ The eighteenth-century press has appeared stagnant in comparison.

Exploring the foundations of news culture and locating the place of the press in society, Uriel Heyd’s Reading Newspapers stakes the eighteenth-century press’s position in the new cultural history of the press. The study is refreshingly post-Habermasian. It offers continuing refinement of the public sphere, but is no longer defined by it or determined by questions of its existence or characteristics. Instead, in the light of recent work on the reciprocal and mutually constitutive nature of transatlantic interaction, it underlines the role of the eighteenth-century press in...