The great game?

‘Work?’ he said to me once, astonished, when I referred to our classroom activities as such. ‘Do you really think that what we do is work?’

‘What else should I call it?’

‘I should call it the most glorious kind of play.’

(Donna Tartt, The Secret History (Penguin, 1993), p. 34).

I’ve been reading newsbooks from the 1640s in recent months as I gear up for my dissertation. In doing so, I have increasingly kept returning to the question of why their editors wrote them. When I first started reading seventeenth-century printed books I think I had a tendency, subconscious or otherwise,  to assume that they were written either for ideological reasons, or for profit. At first glance, writing for pleasure doesn’t seem to fit with a purportedly rational public sphere.

And yet it’s hard to get away from the fact that some editors obviously took a mischievous pleasure in the act of writing. Editors personified their own and rival titles as larger-than life characters, like this woodcut of Mercurius Aulicus from Newes from Smith the Oxford jaylor (1645):

Ideological battles were often fought out in playful or mischievous language, like the attacks on Marchamont Nedham’s pro-Parliament newsbook Mercurius Britanicus over the spelling mistake in its title. Here is the anonymous author of a 1647 broadside called Queres to be considered having fun with Nedham’s spelling:

Whether Britannicus doth not repent, that hee made Hue and Cry after the King, and that whereas before hee spelt his name false, whether he wisheth not he had not spelt it at all, and whether he invoketh not Neptune to beare him safely to some forraigne Land?

Nedham’s tortuous justification for continuing with the mis-spelling basically boils down to an extended “it’s not me that can’t spell, it’s you”:

In the meane time, we have him quarelling at Britanicus for a letter, challenging him that he cannot spell his own name. Poore Aulicus! The Academicall Cur, (like a whelp of Lilly) begins to bark Criticisme, in stead of Slander. Any thing must serve now (in this low ebbe of Affaires) to helpe out the Pamphlet. But thou art mistaken; we doe not write, not read here, as you doe at Oxford: they are not able to spell one word true there; for they spell the Parliament Rebels; Popery, the Protestant Religion; Idolatrie and Superstition, Decencie; Episcopacie, Iure Divino; Reformation, Schisme &c and many such strange kind of spellings.

Part of the attraction of newsbooks was their regularity – a great innovation at the time. Save for sudden swoops by the authorities, a new edition came out every week with page numbering and content picking up where the last issue left off. Readers certainly found them addictive. The wood turner Nehemiah Wallington complained that his newsbook habit meant:

So many theeves… stole away my mony before I was aware of them.

Others shared Wallington’s habit. Thomas Juxon regularly copied extracts from newsbooks into his diary. Fighting his addiction, John Rous protested (too much) that:

The many occurences about the Parliament businesses… are extant in multitudes of bookes and papers (unto which God in mercy put an end!).

But I’ve started to wonder whether writing the news couldn’t sometimes be as addictive as reading it. Exposure to a national audience;  hundreds of copies of your title published every week; almost immediate responses, both positive and negative, in other newsbooks and pamphlets: all these could have been innovative and exhilarating for certain kinds of personality. The explosion of print in 1641 permanently changed the way that politics in England operated, giving public opinion a much wider role than ever and further opening up affairs of state to those traditionally outside the political classes. In such an environment, for some at least, writing newsbooks must have been fun.

None of this is to suggest that journalism in mid-seventeenth century England was a game. Being involved in unlicensed newsbooks in the 1640s and 1650s could be dangerous. Printers could have their presses confiscated, and printers and writers alike could be imprisoned. But reading some of the exchanges between rival editors, you do wonder whether a “glorious kind of play” had at least some role, alongside the political or financial gains that could be made, in popularising newsbooks.

Things noted

• Breaking News: Renaissance Journalism and the Birth of the Newspaper. An online version of this exhibition at the Folger Shakespeare Library. It includes lots of images of early newsbooks and audio descriptions of the exhibits. Curated by Chris Kyle and Jason Peacey (with EIizabeth Walsh).

• Nominations for the Cliopatria Awards 2008 have opened. They reward the best historical blogging and the categories are: best group blog,;best individual blog; best new blog; best post; best series of posts; and best writer.

J.B. Williams

A History of English Journalism to the foundation of the Gazette (1908), by J.B. Williams, is now available in its entirety to download from the Internet Archive. His chapter in the Cambridge History of English and American Literature (1907-21) is also available in full on Bartleby.

Williams’s work is important for those studying English print culture during the seventeenth century. It was the first modern history of early seventeenth-century newsbooks, and spans the trade in corantoes in the 1620s and 1630s as well as the development of the newsbook proper in the 1640s and 1650s. Much like the political histories of the period by S.R. Gardiner and C.H. Firth, it has cast a long shadow over historians’ interpretation of early modern news culture.

Williams’s narrative is Whiggish and sees the 1640s as the crucible of the modern newspaper. In particular, he introduces a cast-list of “pioneering journalists” that have influenced how historians have interpreted newsbooks and used them as sources. Williams actually wrote under a pseudonym, at least during the early stages of his career (he abandoned it in 1914 although I haven’t yet discovered why, or found much else out about his background). His real name was J.G. Muddiman, and he was a descendant of the Restoration journalist Henry Muddiman (perhaps a reason for the pseudonym). For Williams, Muddiman is a “patriarch of English journalism”:

From the founding of the Gazette, until his death in 1692, he was little less than an institution, and the reason why up to the present he has been forgotten is because he devoted himself entirely to journalism, was not a pamphleteer, and engaged in no controversies. (p. 176).

Other newsbook writers receive short shrift compared to Muddiman. Marchamont Nedham, for example, is dismissed with the following words:

He was no patriarch of journalism, invented nothing, originated nothing, and his name is chiefly to be associated with the retrogressive and decadent Mercurius Politicus. (p. 178)

Only recently have scholars like Blair Worden and Joad Raymond restored Nedham’s reputation, together with the importance of Mercurius Politicus as a publication.

By contrast, Williams is intrigued by more eccentric personalities. For example, he has a love-hate relationship with Henry Walker, the independent preacher and pamphleteer. He takes gossip and invective about Walker by his enemies at face value, eager to cast him as an ugly red-headed Judas figure (p.73), who employed a “ragged regiment of tatterdemalions, Mercuries, and hawkers” to sell his books (p. 72). But he also wants to portray Walker as an early news pioneer – pioneering the newspaper advertisement and bringing a capitalist business sense to civil war journalism. This portrait of Walker as part purveyor of titillation, part Fleet Street editor is to misunderstand his complex personality. Walker was not just a newsbook writer: he worked as an ironmonger, seems briefly to have been ordained a deacon, was a well-known preacher, and later in the 1650s ministered to a parish. Walker is still misunderstood and his works sometimes dismissed, a mistake that derives in some part from Williams’s portrait of him.

While Williams was a pioneer in trawling the Thomason Tracts for newsbooks, his scholarship is not always perfect. Writers sometimes have titles mistakenly attributed to them, or attributions made without evidence. This focus on editors also ignores the role of printers, patrons and readers in bringing newsbooks to print.

Williams was also an ardent royalist. This is obvious from the moment you open his book, where you are confronted by a print from the Thomason collection of Charles II. The link to Thomason seems to be the only sketchy link to the book, given that it stops its main narrative in 1659 a year before Charles was restored to the throne, and deals only in conclusion with what happened in the early years of the Restoration.

So why still read Williams? Partly because his fascination with gossip makes for a good read. But he’s also important because, much like Gardiner, his work set the tone for subsequent generations of scholars. His history is a good starting point for anyone interested in understanding mid-seventeenth century newsbooks, although it needs to be read alongside more recent work on the subject. The extent to which Williams was himself influenced by the powerful narratives established by contemporary newsbook writers and historians is, however, another story…