Joad Raymond, ed. News, Newspapers, and Society in Early Modern England. London and Portland: Frank Cass, 1999. ii + 239 pp. $52.50 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7146-4944-3.

Reviewed by Michael Mendle (Department of History, University of Alabama)
Published on H-Albion (April, 2001)

Joad Raymond's work has quickly become the gold standard for studies of seventeenth-century English journalism. His first book, Making the News: An Anthology of Newsbooks of Revolutionary England, 1641-1660 (1993), did much more editorially and contextually than its title indicated. With The Invention of the Newspaper: English Newsbooks, 1641-1649 (1996), Raymond made good on the earlier volume's promise. Far superseding earlier scholarship, it remains a model of industriousness and multidisciplinarity.

No wonder, then, that this collection of essays under Raymond's editorial direction, including his substantive introduction as well as another chapter, was all but canonized on publication: News, Newspapers, and Society in Early Modern England was quickly placed on the open reference shelves of the Bodleian Library's main bibliographical research area, Rm. 132 New Bodley.

But does this volume really belong there? The short answer is that Raymond's own work holds up well, several other essays make useful contributions, and others are too raw or too slight (or both) for such high billing. Indeed, the spread between the best and the least here is embarrassingly large, bearing witness to the value of Raymond's own work even as its calls into question his judgment and perspicacity as editor.

Eschewing the attempt to find common ground amongst these disparate essays, Raymond's introduction briefly but importantly delves into the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century origins of his own subfield: the hows and whens and whys of the newsbooks' rediscovery. Raymond pursues these questions partly as a scholar's homage to his predecessors, partly as a lead-in to his own later chapter on Habermas. But his research is also valuable to other narratives, particularly how the nineteenth century "discovered" the seventeenth precisely when distance became a charm: witness Isaac Disraeli's fascination with "these patriarchal newspapers, covered by the dust of two centuries" (p. 3).

Fritz Levy's "The Decorum of News" tantalizingly compares the news to other consumables subjected to social control in Tudor and early Stuart England. Just as access to Bibles (in Henry VIII's time) and fancy clothing was seen as a function of rank, so too was news. While earthquakes and prodigies were suitable fare for the lower orders, domestic and foreign news were touchier. Medium, of course, also bore a message; oral, manuscript, and printed text, occasional and serial publication (in manuscript or print) had their assumed boundaries, even though (as we are so often reminded) boundaries invited their own transgression. Levy's argument is dynamic: he argues that the expectations accompanying periodicity redefined the news culture of the 1620s. His useful work will be read along with new and forthcoming work by Sabrina Baron and others at work on similar themes.

So will Ian Atherton's chapter, " 'The Itch Grown a Disease': Manuscript Transmission of News in the Seventeenth Century." As does Baron in a recent essay, Atherton argues that manuscript news was more important than printed news in the seventeenth century.[1] More emphatically than Levy, Atherton insists upon the elite audience of the newsletter; printed news had a more catholic distribution and with it, less credibility. To good effect, Atherton insists that manuscript news was not primarily, and often not particularly, ideologically managed. It was hard information, above all, that the newsletter writers sought to produce, and their subscribers wanted to buy; and pace Richard Cust, Atherton insists that manuscript news was as likely to be a "balm" as an "inflammatory powder" (p. 59).

Two mid-seventeenth-century contributions are slighter. S.J. Wiseman's ungainly "Pamphlet Plays in the Civil War Market" insists we must "expand the canon of political theory" (p. 80) to include these slight, humorous comments upon public affairs. Political no doubt these pamphlets were, but "political philosophy" (p. 78) they were not, at least if one is still permitted to distinguish Leviathan from Lambeth Fayr. In "Women in the Business of Parliamentary News" Marcus Neavitt examines precisely one woman journalist, Elizabeth Alkin (a.k.a. Parliament Joan), an occasional parliamentary intelligencer as well as a scribbler and information source for the Impartial Scout and several other newsbooks in 1650 and 1651. Alkin is a figure of considerable guile, but Neavitt's leaden political posturing does not help him perceive it.[2] Nor can it excuse his misuse of "mitigate" for "militate"(p. 88) and his use of a plural verb with "none" (p. 99).

Raymond's own essay fortunately revives the volume at this moment of premature death. His treatment of Juergen Habermas's curiously influential The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society is lucid, careful, respectful, but ultimately dismissive. The place of Habermas in Anglophone early modern "cultural" and media studies is, to say the least, odd. The early parts of Habermas's study, which are in play here, are markedly less assured than his treatment of topics and themes from Kant forwards. They were based, even in their German appearance in 1962, on dreadfully outmoded scholarship; whatever its heuristic value for Habermas's broader argument, Habermas's account of the English press in the seventeenth century (and the emergent "bourgeois public sphere" he associated with it) bears little relationship to the facts. Most pertinent to Raymond, Habermas was apparently unaware that there was a vigorous periodical press in England in the civil war and Interregnum. "[A] regular supply of news," he wrote (Structural Transformation, p. 16), "became public, that is, 'accessible to the general public' only at the end of the seventeenth century." Any reader of Muddiman's History of English Journalism (published in 1908!) would have known better.

Raymond, naturally, insists that the 1640s witnessed a public sphere in some sense (which is surely right), but not in Habermas's. Habermas's public sphere is a variant of the golden-age notion of early liberalism common among Marxists: once upon a time and place (here England in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century) there was an Eden (here a pure, free public sphere of private individuals rationally and disinterestedly examining the issues of the day) before its inevitable, dialectical corruption by the forces of the market. Raymond, knowing the Fall occurred earlier but also that the free play of thoroughly partisan, indeed corrupted interests created a cultural space of enormous vitality, cuts the Habermasian giant to size.

Michael Harris, whose own efforts as book history editor and conference impresario have done so much to advance the field, contributes an essay, "Timely Notices: The Uses of Advertising and its Relationship to News during the Late Seventeenth Century." Harris traces the permeable boundaries of news and advertising, first in the Gazette, which in principle disdained blatantly commercial notices, and then in the commercial papers of the end of the century, amongst which John Houghton's Collection for the Improvement of Husbandry and Trade was clearly the most remarkable. Christine Ferdinand's engaging "Constructing the Frameworks of Desire: How Newspapers Sold Books in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries," not only covers the field indicated by the title with thoroughness and elegance, but much else as well: ancient Roman book advertising; the posting of title pages as incitements to purchase; the roles of auction catalogues, book prospectuses, and publication in fascicles.

The remaining essays, though useful, do not match this standard. G.S. Rousseau's "'Stung into Action': Medicine, Professionalism, and the News," examines how printed publication became the marker of medical knowledge and the professionalism of the authors and their corporate or semi-corporate colleagues in the middle and later eighteenth century. But Rousseau's sure grasp of professional rivalry and its connection to medical publication is not always matched by clearness of expression. Worse, some data are incredible: did the young Turks publishing in Medical Observations really include an eleven-year-old (p. 195, Edward Ford), and the quartet aged between 13 and 17 given on pp. 189 and 195-97? If so, Rousseau surely needed to consider the implications for his theories of professionalism. The volume concludes with Hamish Mathison's thoughtful but slight "Tropes of Promotion and Wellbeing: Advertisement and the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Periodical Press," which places rather a small body of material into the larger matrices of Scottish discourses of national identity, Britishness, and the moral energies of the Enlightenment. The failure of the Forty-Five, he argues, was central to advertising: afterwards Scottish advertising "incorporat[ed] ...monarchical patronage" as well as "a British judicial guarantee" (p. 201). This is promising, but whether his few, over-read examples can bear the burden of interpretation laid upon them is an open question.

Raymond, thus, has assembled a packet of essays ranging the from the general to the rather particular, and from the polished to the unfinished. As a collection it is no way synoptic. Yet the best pieces justify their advance billing, and several of them will contribute in various ways to the current discussion of the place of printing in the spectrum of news publication.

Notes

[1]. "The Guises of Dissemination in Early Seventeenth-Century England: News in Manuscript and in Print," in Brendan Dooley and Sabrina Baron, eds., The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe_ (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 41-56.

[2]. Neavitt, for example, chastises the arch-Tory Joseph Muddiman (under his pseudonym, J. B. Williams) for the sexist pronouns in Muddiman's 1908 classic A History of English Journalism (p. 101) and rants against the "phallocentric politics of canonicity" (p. 87). Little of this, though, probes the hard questions about Alkins' brief journalisitic career -- especially why she flitted from one newsbook to another.

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Citation: Michael Mendle. Review of Raymond, Joad, ed., News, Newspapers, and Society in Early Modern England. H-Albion, H-Net Reviews. April, 2001.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=5064

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