Abstract
During these years of great change in the reporting of Parliament in the press, newspapers still endeavoured to provide a service describing the latest social affairs and nowhere was this more apparent than in the coffee-houses — especially those in the Covent Garden area. The centre for the proprietors of The St. James’s Chronicle was the Bedford. As George Colman and Bonnell Thornton remarked: ‘This coffeehouse is every night crowded with men of parts. Almost every one you meet is a polite scholar and a wit; jokes and bon mots are echoed from box to box; every branch of literature is critically examined, and the merit of every production of the theatres weighed and determined.’ It was here that the phalanx of first-class wits provided many of the exclusive stories for the Chronicle.
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References
Court Book (MS, Stationers’ Hall).
Annual Register 17 (1774). ‘The Minute Books of the St. James’s Chronicle’.
Bond, Richard and Marjorie N. 27 October 1774; 29 June 1775.
Poetical Works of William Coupe ‘Introduction’.
Purnell’s New Encyclopedia vol. 11, p. 53–63.
Francis Williams, Dangerous Estate p. 49.
Dewi Morgan, Phoenix of Fleet Street p. 143.
Evening Standard Library files.
Sir Philip Gibbs, The Journalist’s London p. 150.
Gentleman’s Magazine August 1781.
E. Howe & Harold Wait, The London Society of Compositors pp. 43–64.
A. Aspinall, Politics and The Press c. 1780–1850, p. 68.
History of The Times vol. I, pps. 3–8.
Evening Standard Library files.
John Child, Industrial Relations in the Printing Industry p. 51.
Richard and Marjorie N. Bond, op. cit., 4 May 1808; 8 June 1808; 6 July 1808.
H. Herd, The March ofJournalism p. 102.
History of The Times vol. I, pps. 109–19.
The St. James’s Chronicle file, Guildhall Library, London.
Ibid.
Conversations with Earl of Halsbury, great-grandson of Dr Stanley Lees Giffard.
Ibid.
Aspinall, A., The Formation of Canning’s Ministry p. 166.
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© 1996 Dennis Griffiths
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Griffiths, D. (1996). A Phalanx of First-Class Wits. In: Plant Here The Standard. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-12461-9_3
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