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  • All the News That's Fit to Film?Copying the Nichols Collection of Early London Newspapers
  • Mark S. Dawson (bio)

Working with early newspapers is notoriously difficult, not to say onerous. Aside from questions of definition - what sort of format, content, or periodicity constitutes a newspaper? - tracking the multitude of serials that poured from the presses on a weekly or daily basis in later Stuart and early Georgian London has tested bibliographers and historians alike.1 Publishers lost count of their issue numbers, especially when a hasty reprinting of a day's edition was needed to meet unexpected demand, or, occasionally, to create demand by deliberately inflating these same numbers to give an exaggerated sense of the paper's regularity cum longevity. Compounding these bibliographic headaches is the hijacking of titles. Rival publications bearing the same nomenclature appeared on the capital's streets within hours of each other. Since it was not unusual for a title to be printed at more than one press, first readers were themselves not immediately aware of any counterfeit.

An example of this hijacking concerns the Domestic(k) Intelligence, produced by Nathaniel Thompson as the Exclusion Crisis escalated in 1679. Thompson's paper survives from issue '16' to '18', though his workshop somehow managed to undercount by one. To pass as genuine, '16' should have read '15'. Thompson altered his semi-weekly's title on 9 September, adding the prefix True. The new title retained the original, fictional count (starting from '19'), but otherwise showed Thompson's hand. Issue '16' had, in fact, been an attempt to usurp the publication of the same name launched by Benjamin Harris the previous July. Thompson's gambit could well have been fuelled by political and confessional differences as much as commercial rivalry.2 While we might well know a newspaper's nominal publishing routine, we cannot always be sure that a missing number was ever actually [End Page 129] printed, especially when there are other signs that the publisher was about to cease production. Of course, if we have evidence of a production - perhaps an allusion to an issue in a later number in the same series - we still have to determine whether it is extant.

Following its release from 1978 by Research Publications International, the Early English Newspapers microfilm (hereafter EEN) became a mainstay for a generation of early modern scholars because it promised to resolve some of these challenges. The film made a mountain of material available to those working beyond England's shores. More fundamentally, the microfilm was said to 'bring together' what were considered the two largest collections of the earliest metropolitan newsprint, Burney from the British Library (or British Museum as it was then) and Nichols at the Bodleian Library, 'so that one can at last fill the gaps of the other'.3

That the microfilming had incorporated the two collections was a claim reiterated by supplementary guides accompanying units based on later British Library holdings, particularly through to nineteenth-century publications.4 If they do not simply direct users to the aforementioned guides, reader-education materials written by purchasing libraries suggest EEN film 'amalgamated', 'includes', or 'combines' Burney and Nichols.5 So, inevitably, do publications borrowing from those materials.6 Implicitly, the Bodleian shares this characterisation in practice. Bearing in mind that the volumes comprising the Nichols collection now have to be fetched from a remote storage facility at Swindon, EEN still makes sense for reasons of efficiency, offsetting concerns about print conservation if not carbon footprints. After all, the current promotional material for EEN from its successor publisher, Gale Cengage, implies that the project's foresight saved texts that were not [End Page 130] only rare but also 'deteriorating', and supposedly in danger of crumbling to dust.7

Still on sale, the microfilm remains user-friendly for researchers even if they now have access to a next-generation, digital surrogate of Burney (hereafter BCN, or Burney Collection Newspapers).8 For some readers wish to follow the evolving stance of the highly partisan press on a given political concern, or they know that different kinds of economic data or social information were best reported by a certain title before its (mis)appropriation...

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